Here are the benchmarks thus far:

Be sure to check out Brendan’s Roadmap Updates for more.  Also here are a few handy links from John Resig on the testing:

• SunSpider, 1.83x faster (released by the WebKit team)
• SunSpider ubench, 22.5x faster (released by the WebKit team for testing Squirrelfish)
• Image Manipulation Demo, 6.46x faster (Change the contrast and brightness of images dynamically)
• Matrix Manipulation, 6.26x faster (with the Sylvester JavaScript library)

So the big question is, will Firefox be able to make Firefox 3.1 even faster in the area of JavaScript?  If you have the nightly build of Firefox 3.1 installed, you can turn TraceMonkey on by going to about:config and then toggle the javascript.options.jit.content setting from false to true.  For the rest of us out there though, this is just one more surprise to look forward to once Firefox 3.1 gets rolled out to the public.

For more info, be sure to check out Firefox 3.1 to Get More JavaScript Speed Optimizations – as the CyberNet team had done a good in-depth look into this and has done the best job at making it make sense to everybody.

Beta 2 addresses over 900 memory issues as well as various stability issues within the Gecko core itself with Mozilla migrating over to the 1.9 platform for Firefox 3.0 and the new Mozilla 2.0 platform for Firefox 4.0 and other issues like XSS (Cross Site Scripting) leaks through JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) which is used as a data interchange format.

Also making an appearance is the new highly touted download manager, and the awesome bar AKA the new location bar.

The browser also features a complete backend rewrite for using the SQL engine and garbage collection (software memory usage). Now that Firefox could also support offline applications like the ever popular Google Reader through its own built in functionality or through the usage of Google Gears which has also been in use for ZohoWriter – an online word processor and competitor of Google’s.

Functionality wise, Firefox 3.0 functions and behaves as well as other 2.0 and 1.5 cousins with the added bonus of better RAM usage and built in PDF page printing (currently not implemented in the UI).

For those of you who are hardware conscious about the RAM GB’s, there’s an extension available from Mozilla’s Stuart Parementer “RAMBack” which empties Firefox 3.0’s memory caches both disk and RAM.

Conclusion

After having used Firefox 3.0 solidly for the past 3 weeks I was impressed with the results of the work Mozilla have plagued into the browser. Looking through some of the other features, it’s clear that they have listened to the community regarding the direction of the browser. Features such as an integrated restart function for when new items – extensions/themes are installed and an all in one location bar.

I look forward to seeing the final product when it’s released later on this year.

Posted by Si Howard – Si Is currently studying for a Bachelors in Computer Science and turned to Firefox and Thunderbird after many years as a Netscape user. He maintains a personal blog at devastator.wordpress.com

Relive some of the memories you’ve had and think ahead at what 2007 has yet to bring us. Were you as excited about you Christmas presents as you were Firefox 2 coming out? Yeah – I was too.

Here we are at the end of 2006! I can’t believe this year is nearly over and thought wouldn’t it be neat to take a look at all the changes to Firefox over the past year? A lot has happened (more then I first realized) with a total of 11 official releases.

+ Check Out the Firefox Year in Review from the Firefox Extension Guru!