[James (Jim) Hillier]

You are probably all aware of Firefox's dwindling market share in recent months. If you are persistent Firefox users, like myself, you would also be well aware of the main reasons for that; high resource usage and and slow rendering speed (when compared to the opposition). Mozilla has been trying its level best to come up with a faster browser which is kinder on resources and reports are that yesterday’s release is a big milestone along that path.

Reputable benchmark tests are reporting rendering speeds 3 times faster than previous versions. One major enhancement is the incorporation of hardware accelerated graphics which enables websites to load faster and speeds up rendering of rich and interactive web content like games, apps and photos. Also the inclusion of WebGL into the build has opened up a new dimension in 3D Graphics.

All sounds good and there is no doubt Firefox has lost ground recently, particularly to the very fast Google Chrome. Hopefully this new version 4 will set good old Firefox back on the right track.

Firefox 4 Beta can be downloaded from HERE.
BUT, remember this is a Beta version and should be installed only by experienced users. Most would be best to wait for the final version release.

[marko]

Yep, despite having had my fair share of issues with FF I'm sticking with it myself, I still have chrome kicking about as well but my default browser most probably will always be FF!

[DaComboMan]

Keep coming back to Firefox all the time...

I found this fip from Lifehacker to be most useful for present 3.6.12 build:
"Once you get into about:config, type browser.cache into the filter bar at the top. Find browser.cache.disk.enable and set it to false by double clicking on it. You'll then want to set browser.cache.memory.enable to true (mine seemed to already be set as such), and create a new preference by right clicking anywhere, hitting New, and choosing Integer. Call the preference browser.cache.memory.capacity and hit OK. In the next window, type in the number of kilobytes you want to assign to the cache (for example, typing 100000 would create a cache of 100,000 kilobytes or 100 megabytes). A value of -1 will tell Firefox to dynamically determine the cache size depending on how much RAM you have."

In fact, i've set mine to -1 and resource usage has diminished by about 30,000 (memory).