The Firefox project really started to stagnate for a while when it came to performance. FF2 felt as glacially slow as the Mozilla Suite that it replaced. Thankfully, and I believe in part due to competition from Safari, the FF3 betas are incredibly fast. The speedup is as staggering as the jump from IE6 to what at the time was called Phoenix.
Which is fantastic, because it means that I can use Google Docs, Zimbra, and other cloud applications on my Fujitsu P2120. Opera was fast, but it’s DOM implementation was just too quirky. FF3 is still in beta, but it renders like a gecko browser. The web just works. That’s important because it makes all the cheaper, but less powerful, sub-notebooks appearing on the market practical. FF2 was painful for surfing the web on machines with that level of processing power. In FF3, I can actually get something done, on a 4 year old machine with questionable usefulness when it was new. Thanks Mozilla for making my laptop useful again.
