We had Asa Dotzler from Mozilla come into class last night to look the presentations on how to spread Firefox virally.
I noticed that he was using a MacBook Pro and asked him if he found Firefox slower than Safari.
His response was: “Try out Firefox 3 Beta 4″.
I did the moment I got home and am blown away!
My main complaint about Firefox in the past was that it felt like a big fat chunk of code. It was slow to start up (compared to Safari) and just didn’t feel very smooth.
The new Firefox 3 starts up very very quickly (faster than Safari) and the user interface objects (buttons and icons) were very Mac-like.
I have just imported all my Safari bookmarks into Firefox and will use it over the next few days to see if it should become my default browser.
Asa did mention last night that the functional differences between the various browsers are getting fewer. For example, previously Google Docs would complain about a Safari browser. Recently, I found that Safari now works with Google Docs. So there is less of a rational for switching browsers at the functional, web page rendering level. Instead, market share expansion will probably come as a result of performance improvements and branding (being cool using Firefox vs being passe using IE).