Speedier Firefox Aims to Lead the Way

Early tests have found Mozilla's latest version of Firefox is much speedier than earlier versions and it runs rings around its rivals, PC World reports. One blogger found Firefox 3 Beta 4 was nearly twice as fast as Safari and Opera, and the Beta 4 version, and three times faster than Explorer. Mozilla's head of development said the company is tweaking Firefox  to make "really heavy-duty applications" run faster.

"Web apps today are magnitudes more complex than those from five years ago," he noted. While boosting browser speed further might not make much difference to basic web pages, Mozilla is trying to build a browser that will let developers start building more complex web 2.0 applications in line with Mozilla's mission "to move the Web as a platform forward," its development chief said. (More Firefox stories.)