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While Internet Explorer has been the dominant web browser for the past decade or so since it began bundling it with its Windows OS, we have seen quite a few new web browsers surface over the years. Opera, Safari, and most importantly Mozilla Firefox. By now practically every single casual web surfer is either using or has at least heard of it before. Since it was first released back in 2004, Firefox has slowly gained momentum in the browser wars and with the latest beta released just a few days ago, it seems like the next major release of Mozilla Firefox 3, is only going to increase this momentum.

Note first of all that the program I'm reviewing is the Mac version and there might be slight differences between this version and the Windows/Linux version which I might not know of. That being said, the Mac version of the Firefox 3 beta works like a dream. In the past I've always favoured Apple's Safari over Firefox 2 because Firefox was basically a port of the Windows version, making it a very sluggish and irritating browser to use, especially when it takes like 5 to 10 seconds to open. However, despite only being a beta, Firefox 3 for the Mac runs a lot more smoothly in terms of performance. When you compare the speed at which it loads webpages with Firefox 2, there doesn't seem to be much of a difference, which is a good thing. In my opinion, rendering a website can only occur so fast and Firefox 2 is probably as good as it's gonna get.

Firefox 3 looks a lot better as well, but this probably only applies to the Mac version since Firefox 2 really looked pretty bad on the Mac. Now, Firefox feels a lot more like a program that belongs on a Mac instead of one being shoehorned onto the Mac. While it's just an aesthetic feature, it's surprising how big of an impact it makes.

When it comes to new features, Firefox 3 definitely doesn't come up short. From the release note, it's obvious that the development team hasn't been lazing around since it released Firefox 2 back in 2006. It's based on an updated rendering system that allows web applications like Gmail to run at "twice the speed", which is a pretty true claim since the lag times I used to experience while using Firefox with Gmail in the past no longer exist.

A brand new download manager has also been introduced which has a few new features. For example it has a search bar at the bottom so that you can quickly search through your downloads if you have a long record of them in the download manager. It also displays when and where you downloaded the file from, making it much easier to manage your downloads. Most importantly, users can now resume downloads even after you restart the browser or reset your internet connection as long as the server you're download from allows resumable downloads. This will hopefully save a lot of people some frustration if their internet connection gets dropped when their download reaches 99%.

One of the biggest problems that users have repeated complained about is Firefox's memory usage problem as Firefox is notorious for memory leaks after long periods of usage, seriously slowing down the user's computer even if he/she isn't doing much web surfing. Just letting it sit in the background will cause your other applications to experiecne a significant slowdown. Thankfully, Firefox 3 is addressing these problems by making use of new technology to prevent such memory leaks in the future. From my experience with it thus far, the development team has done a pretty good job, since I've been using Firefox for the entire day now without having to restart it even once and neither has it crashed on me yet, unlike Firefox 2.

However, being in its beta stages, this software is obviously far from perfect. Most plugins and themes (understandably) don't work with it yet and the in-built dictionary that was perfect in Firefox 2 now draws squiggly red lines under words like "doesn't", thinking it's an incorrect word. The text editing window that I'm typing this post in right now in Wordpress is also slightly buggy, occasionally not showing a space on screen even after I tap the spacebar several times. Still, all these are understandable problems that one would expect from a beta version of any piece of software. Just take note of this if you currently heavily rely on your Firefox plugins because none of them will work with this beta version, but it'd still be fun to download and play around with in anticipation for the final version.

With Netscape down for the count, only Firefox has a chance at unseating Internet Explorer as the dominant web browser. With Microsoft recently releasing the beta version of Internet Explorer 8 as well, it seems like the browser wars are far from over. Yet, from what we've seen from the beta version, Mozilla Firefox 3 just might have a shot at stealing even more IE users away from that darn browser. In fact, the only reason why this is getting a 4/5 rating is because it's the beta version, I can't wait to get my hands on the final version when it's ready.

Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 4 can be downloaded here

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