The good folks at Mozilla keep plugging away at Firefox 3. Now Firefox 3 Beta 5 is ready for download.
The two big ticket items for Firefox 3 Beta 5 are improved OS integration (Windows, OS X, and Linux) and increased Javascript performance. If you are one of those people that felt Firefox 2 just wasn’t “OS X-y enough”, you’re in luck.
On the Javascript performance front, the release notes specifically state that “web applications like Google Mail … run twice as fast in Firefox 3 Beta 5.” Funny enough, Gmail is still horribly broken (per bug 415252). Since I’m a full-time Gmail user, I can tell you that although “twice as fast” may be a bit of an exaggeration from a user’s point of view, there is definitely a performance improvement over previous versions of Firefox 3.
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The twice as fast is really in comparison to Firefox 2. We’ve made some more big improvements between Beta 4 and Beta 5, but I don’t think that those amounted to another doubling. Last I heard, we were 2-3 times faster than Firefox 2.
- A
When you think about it, the wording of the release makes sense. I was thinking of it in a Beta 4 to Beta 5 context because I’ve been moving from release to release.
That being said, I do feel there is some improved snappiness in Gmail between 4 and 5, but maybe that’s just the pleasant side effect of a restart.
I think you’re right that there is an improvement from b4 to b5 on gmail. I definitely see it and if you compare sunspider JS perf numbers from b4 to b5, there’s evidence of some more major improvements.