If you doing web programming then, browsers are very important tools. For me, I have 4 major browsers installed, namely, FireFox, Opera, Flock and of course IE7. IE7 is used as a last recourse when final testing is done on a web page for compatibility. Other than that, I rarely even open IE7.

Anyway I’ve both the latest FireFox 2 and FireFox 3 beta installed and I feel that FireFox3 is blazingly fast!

The blog article from ZDNet confirms it:

In some tests, it’s three times faster than Firefox 2 (meaning the test completes in 1/3 the time), and a whopping five times faster than IE 7

The other features mentioned are:

• Smarter location bar that tunes itself to your browsing habits. As you type in part of the URL it will offer suggestions based on where you’ve been before.
• Better native look-n-feel on Vista, Mac OSX, and Linux. This includes continuing work on icons, menus, native controls.
• Zoom just the text or the whole page. Zooming the text was one feature I missed from Firefox 2.
• Reduced memory usage. This is the main reason I switched to Firefox 3 for my everyday use. The old version often became unstable after a long session with many tabs open.

My only gripe with FireFox 3 Beta is that it doesn’t support the majority of my FireFox plugins. So I still use FireFox 2 most of the time. Yes, you can install both versions in the same Windows machine but only one can run at any one time.