Dylan Schiemann

Firefox 3 launches today, with significant upgrades across ever facet of the web browser, from chrome (a much improved address bar, bookmarks system, and more easily searchable password and cookie managers), to significant rendering and JavaScript engine performance improvements.

At this point, Safari and Firefox are in a battle of the ages for performance and ease of use. At the moment, in my opinion, Safari is winning on that battle, due to Apple’s investment to make the iPhone the ultimate platform, but Firefox has such a healthier community of add-ons and development tools that I continue to use Firefox for most of my daily web use.

I’ve been using Firefox 3 since the last alpha release, and I’m very pleased with the progression they have made. There are still some annoyances (can’t we get rid of dialogs completely and move everything to the page header like the style done for saving passwords and displaying popups… dialogs across tabs for cookies are annoying, but not as annoying as allowing ad tracking cookies), and yet it is the world’s most advanced web development platform today, and still my browser of choice.

The announcement of Firefox 3.1 later this year is a great sign that we can expect browser improvements more frequently, rather than waiting a year or two between major improvement cycles. Congrats to the entire Mozilla Community on this great release!