You’ve no doubt heard the frenzy of marketing and PR that surrounded the launch of Firefox 3, (it even made the BBC News website) but is the new browser really that good?

I started using Firefox back in the version 1.5 days, at a time when IE6 was the main browser. As a web developer, Firefox was the main contender because it rendered HTML and CSS in the correct way (well as near as dammit) and it had a load of cool extensions that could enhance its standard features and really helped develop and sort out problems on websites.

Continue through to Firefox 2, and it got even better, with more features, slightly more reliable and more extensions.  However, by the time Internet Explorer 7 and Opera 9 had launched, Firefox was really starting to become a pain to use, but unfortunately I was pretty much stuck with it. Opera 9 and IE7 were far superior to use – they were quicker to start, used an acceptable amount of memory and loaded pages so much quicker. GMail was starting to become almost unusable on Firefox 2 – it was so slow to load and switch between emails that I found myself using Opera and IE7 for the day to day browsing, and Firefox to develop with.

Now Firefox 3 is here, and even after only a few hours of use, I know it is going to become my default browser once again. Sure it’s still not as sprightly as IE7 to initially start up (mainly because half of IE7′s code starts when you launch Windows) but it is an improvement. Pages snap up as quickly as the others, and GMail is usable again. The memory leak problems seem to be improved and all the main websites I’ve checked still work as they used to. A couple of the extensions I used did not work with the new version:

• Firebug – but there is a new version 1.1, albeit in Beta, that works with Firefox 3
• del.icio.us – have launched a much improved extension to replace the old one
• YSlow works absolutely fine also
• And even one of my favourites ColorZilla has just been fixed to work with FF3.

So even without mentioning the new features, I’m a very happy bunny that Firefox 3 works well again.

Edit – on a different note, this article was indexed by Google in 8 minutes – that’s mighty quick!