I just downloaded the new Firefox 3 browser and I'm pretty impressed with it.  I was hesitant to download it right away because new products are usually buggy and the last thing I wanted was to gum my machine up with a new piece of software.  But the poor performance of IE7 and Firefox 2 convinced me to give it a try.  With both IE7 and Firefox 2 I was continuously experiencing memory links.  What that means is that if my computer was on for an extended period of time, the browsers would grab more and more memory, eventually slowing down or freezing up my computer.  I found this problem particularly bad when my computer went into sleep mode. 

So after reading that Firefox 3 had solved this problem I decided to give it a try.

The download and installation went flawlessly.  It asked a couple of basic questions and installed right over my previous version.  I didn't even need to restart my computer.  But the real surprise came when it opened up.  It was fast, blazing fast. It rendered pages much faster than the previous version and based on a non scientific analysis, faster than IE7.  Mozilla, the organization that developed Firefox, claims that the browser runs Javascript 3 times faster than Firefox 2.  Since many websites utilize Javascript this is one factor in the faster page loading times.

I've kept my computer on all day and so far, I haven't had any problems with performance.  Hopefully those memory leaks are gone.  There were several enhancements made to fix this particular problem and it seems like they are working. 

Firefox 3 also brings some significant enhancements to the browser space.  These include:

• 1-click bookmarking (hopefully Amazon won't sue them for this term).  You can add a site to your bookmarks by clicking a little start icon in the browser bar. 
• Anti-malware - alerts you if a site your are visiting is trying to download something malicious to your computer.
• Full Zoom -an easier way to zoom in on parts of a webpage to see more detail.

These are just a few of the new features and improvements.  To read a review of some of the other features of the browser, which I haven't used and probably never will, visit Firefox 3 review at Mozilla links.

Firefox has now upped the ante in the browser wars.  It has slowly been whittling down Microsoft's lead in the browser market share and it will be interesting to see how Microsoft responds.  Expect to see these and more features coming from the next version of IE soon.