At last ... a Firefox that's at least as fast as Chrome

I just downloaded the latest Firefox 3.5 release candidate and well, although it's not yet the final product, I should say I'm extremely satisfied with what they've accomplished so far. Here's a screen shot after the download. I know ... I did the download via Google Chrome. =)



Ever since I posted an article here about my first few minutes in Chrome, most of my browsing has been done on Google's blazing fast browser. Unfortunately, that has been the only reason for using it - because of its speed. Other than that, it was quite buggy ... even when using Google's own Google Docs or even Blogger's Layout!

I've tested both web apps on this Firefox and everything went smoothly; much much better than the beta ... almost ...

A bug when using with Google Docs ...

I'm noticing one problem in Google Docs though. It happens when you pluck out a tab from an entire Firefox window. See the screen shot below:


The moment I pluck out that tab, which is supposed to open a new Firefox window, this is what happens:
Notice how it simply pastes the URL of that tab on the document. I've underlined it in yellow.

I'm sure it's just a minor glitch that they can fix pretty soon.

If you haven't tried that feature of plucking out and inserting tabs out yet, I encourage you to do so. It's not just fancy stuff but can actually be very useful when you're fond of opening multiple tabs and multiple windows. It can be quite addictive - be forewarned. As of this writing, the whole plucking exercise is still much smoother and faster in Chrome.

All in all, I think Firefox has finally done it. It's now as fast as Chrome ... and even more stable.

6 comments:

Vincent said...

I haven't used it yet, but this looks like the expected result if you drag a tab into a text area.

Anonymous said...

I've been using Firefox and Seamonkey nightly builds, and in the past few months they have definitely caught up with Google Chrome and Apple Safari, and are within a few milliseconds of equalling the Webkit Javascript performance. When you consider the many other features in the Mozilla suite of browsers, I suspect that many more people will continue to prefer the Mozilla based projects.

johnV said...

@ brian. I haven't tried Seamonkey yet. What are its advantages?

Joe said...

Actually, 3.5 has now been officially released. That version comes up on the main Firefox page on mozilla.com. I dropped it on my Slackware partition last night. I like it a lot.

crowlord said...

To my mind Mozilla have dropped the ball for me. I hung on for ages but finally adopted chrome as i didnt have to make a cuppa while it loaded. Now I'm so used to it I think I will just stick with it.

johnV said...

@ Paul. That's what I thought too. Even blogged about how fast Chrome was. Unfortunately, I had some problems with Chrome in certain Google-owned web apps, Blogger included.

So when I tried Firefox 3.5, and it delivered @ the right speed, I made the trip back.