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Firefox 3.0 was released today and it includes a number of new features as well as performance boosts. I'm writing about this here because of its Javascript performance. As many of you know, the new(er) build calculator is rather beastly in terms of initial load time.

This is about as unscientific and unexact as you can get, but before upgrading, I counted in my head how long the calculator took to load. I estimated around 9-10 seconds on my machine. After the upgrade, it went down to 6-7 seconds, so it's definitely something to get if you use the build calculator at all (and even if you don't).

Let's hope those memory leaks are gone too. There's a link on the top left of most pages to download Firefox.

Eh, looks like it was technically released yesterday (June 17) at the time I wrote this.

Memory leak seems to still be around, but it goes up much slower than before. I don't really like how the url bar uses bookmarks to autocomplete, so I disabled that. Overall though, I'm liking it a lot, it's much more responsive and snappy than 2.0. The difference is particularly noticeable on resource-intensive sites like Gmail and Facebook.

Better performance is good news for browser-based game developers. ;)

Yeah, Mozilla rocks and so do you!