Firefox 3 Beta 4 is five times faster than IE7

Mozilla has launched Firefox 3 beta and test results show it's five times faster than Internet Explorer IE7 and three times faster than its previous version Firefox 2. Added features include an improved location bar and reduced memory usage.

Firefox reached a magical figure of 500 million downloads recently and it launched Firefox 3 beta 3 last month. Today it launched the next beta version, beta 4, which is now available for download here.

ZDNet said that this beta will be one last version before they are available for everyone.

The beta stage is essential to test the strengths and weaknesses of the browser, so Mozilla can find bugs before the browser is released to the public. Firefox 3 has responded well so far especially with the speed of the browser.

Test results (Sunspider JavaScript Benchmark) are shown in the graph below:

Other improvements in the new beta versions are the following:

• Improved Location bar: As yuo type in the URL, Firefox provides suggestion to type the site names faster (similar to Google Suggest tool used in Google Search and Google Toolbar).

• Better native look and feel on Vista, Mac OSX, and Linux. This includes continuing work on icons, menus, native controls.

• Improved Zoom function, where you can either zoom a portion of the page or the whole page.

• Reduced memory usage of the browser. The disadvantage of Firefox 2 was that it occupied too much memory hogging the computer and some times crashes the windows especially when you use more tabs. But Firefox 3 occupies only a portion of the memory compared to the previous one.

To see all the changes, see the release notes here.