techForum: Firefox 3.5 really is faster and better

Posted by pchelptech at 8:20 p.m. | Sunday, August 16, 2009

I know, this isn't exactly news, but if you haven't upgraded to Firefox 3.5 by now, you probably should - and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

All the good things that made the majority of users choose Firefox (other than those who just blindly accepted IE because they had no idea how to do otherwise) are still there. But there are a few new features. Some are new (native JSON support, web worker threads), and some are just new to Firefox (private browsing). Other features were available in add-ons, such as Tab Mix Plus and Session Manager (closed tabs, closed windows, tab tearing).

These new or borrowed features are important factors that will contribute to Firefox staying ahead of the competition, but I think I'm not the only one who was starting to get tired of every bell and whistle slowing the browser down. Safari wasn't going to tempt me away, but Chrome - while it didn't impress at first - started to really grow on me. Thanks to Chrome View, I could set certain sites to load up in Chrome instead. I'd noticed that Firefox 3.0.x, while it felt like an improvement at first, seemed to have terrible trouble with sites with deeply nested links. It simply took a ridiculously long time to load such sites, making the browsing experience pretty unbearable in the process.

So, the main area for improvement for Mozilla to look at, for me, was speed. Chrome and Safari had it. Chrome had some neat features too (even if Safari had nothing), but it had no add-ons (and probably never will). Once I heard that Firefox 3.5.x was much faster than Firefox 3.0.x I was very nearly sold. It was just a matter of time before all my favourite add-ons were confirmed compatible with 3.5 and then I'd be on my way.

My favourite add-ons (all FF 3.5 ready :)
- Ad Block Plus (essential)
- Greasemonkey (essential)
- Personas
- Tab Mix Plus (quite redundant now though)
- Selenium IDE (essential)
- Flashgot
- Firebug (essential)
- Speed Dial (essential)
- Stumbleupon
- Forecastfox
- Zemanta

Now that I have upgraded, since all the add-ons listed above are supported, I can vouch for greatly improved performance. The claims from Mozilla were that FF 3.5 is over 2x faster than FF 3.0, while benchmark tests on many sites claim it's up to 2.5x faster. All I can say so far is that I can feel a huge improvement. Most of the frustration has been removed, and I don't think I'll be reaching for Chrome quite so often from now on.