Mozilla released Firefox 3 on Tuesday, opening a new front in the browser wars.

Browsers are growing up. From being mere gateways to the internet, they have transformed into tool that make online applications possible. In this new era, it's Firefox — the heir to the Netscape legacy — that's going up against the victor of the last era, Internet Explorer.

Firefox is the second-ranked browser in market share for May 2008. (Credit: Net Applications)

"It gives you the horsepower you need to experience rich internet apps as they should be from a performance standpoint," said Damon Sicore, Mozilla's director of platform engineering, who mentioned Gmail and Google Maps specifically as applications where users don't want to wait. "As these apps get bigger and more complicated, faster browsers are going to become more critical."

Specifically, it takes 60 milliseconds to change Gmail from showing one message to another with Firefox 3, Sicore said, compared with 413 milliseconds for IE 7 and 227 for Firefox 2.

Microsoft is toiling away on IE8, though, with a first beta released and a second scheduled to emerge in August. The program has been reworked to improve performance, said Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's general manager in charge of IE. With no prompting, he mentioned Gmail as one area where the company has received favourable feedback, and he clearly welcomes the competition.

"IE is the browser of choice for more people on the Web than anything else," Hachamovitch said. "There's an all-around quality, whether in ease of use, reliability, the security we stand by, that makes it a better choice."

Vying for share
Mozilla is a force to be reckoned with, with 18 per cent market share to 74 for IE, according to Net Applications statistics. That's enough to ensure that major websites have to support Firefox.

Apple's Safari — now available for Windows too — is in third place with six per cent share. The next contender, Opera, has less than one per cent, but it's scrappy: "The browser is the single most important piece of software made today, so innovation is incredibly important if you want to extend the reach of the web," the company said in a statement.

Microsoft knows the stakes are high, with a richer web coming into being. "It is a particularly fertile period. A bunch of pieces started lining up magically in the last couple years to get some innovation going here," Hachamovitch said.

Firefox 3 has been steadily climbing in usage through its testing period.
(Credit: Net Applications)

Firefox isn't shying away from competition either. To try to heighten its profile, Mozilla hopes to set a 24-hour download record with Firefox 3, which has been code-named Gran Paradiso.

Perhaps a more fruitful alternative to whipping fans into a lather though, would be to court business users.

"Mozilla needs to show corporations some love," said Forrester analyst Thomas Mendel in a recent report. "Large-scale, companywide deployments are not yet typical. Mozilla continues to expend little energy on wooing IT managers to formally adopt Firefox," for example by offering paid support services, he said.

Firefox 3 features
Faster performance is one Firefox 3 improvement Sicore points to. Two others are better memory handling and what's known as the Awesome Bar.

To test memory use, Firefox programmers load 500 pages from top websites then close and open them thousands of times. Through that process, Mozilla stamped out many memory "leaks" under which Firefox 2 wouldn't relinquish memory once it was no longer needed, Sicore said. The company also reduced the amount of memory the browser requires overall.

Among other features in Firefox 3:

• A prominent warning when a user tries to open a page that has been shown to host malware or has been involved in phishing — the attempt to fool people into entering personal information into a counterfeit website.
• Offline data access, a feature that can make web applications usable even when the network is unavailable. That's a potential boon for web apps, but future versions of IE 8 and Safari also support the technology.
• Web-based protocol handlers, which let the browser launch a web application rather than a PC program for certain actions such as a website "mailto" link that otherwise would create an e-mail in software such as Outlook.
• The Cairo graphics engine that lays the foundation for better direct integration with a computer's video hardware. "Video inside the browser is coming," Sicore said.
• Animated PNG (Portable Network Graphics), another nail in the coffin of the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) image type.
• A better full-page zoom feature that devotes maximum screen real estate to the browser. Moving the mouse pointer over a thin strip across the top of the screen temporarily pulls down the browser controls.
• A star button to quickly add bookmarks; double-clicking opens a dialog box that lets users describe bookmarks with tags.
• Support for Windows Vista's parental controls.
• Better support for Mac OS X. For example, it has a Mac-native appearance and has been re-plumbed internally to use Apple's Cocoa technology, a necessary step on the road toward 64-bit support.

Plug-in problems
One of Firefox's claims to fame is the wide collection of add-ons that are available, which include Yahoo's Delicious and the Firebug tool for website developers.

One that will not be ported to Firefox 3 is Google Browser Sync, which synchronises bookmarks, passwords, and other settings across multiple installations of Firefox 2. "Phasing out Google Browser Sync was a tough call, but we have decided to focus our efforts on other products, like Toolbar and Gears, that also extend the capability of multiple browsers," Google said of the Labs project in a statement. Happily, there are other alternatives such as Foxmarks.

Of the top add-ons, "the majority have upgraded 3.0," Sicore said. The laggards will have a grace period "on the order of months" before Firefox 2.0 versions will automatically suggest installing the upgrade.




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