We’re all Mozilla Firefox users in the Upstream office. Let’s not get into why.

A month ago Mozilla released the 5th beta of the latest version of Firefox (v3), rumoured to be the last beta before the first RC appears. Having tested it for a couple of weeks now, I have to say, it’s superb. Not only is it a huge upgrade from the latest v2 build, but Mozilla claim to have made over 750 improvements since beta 4, so you can tell they’re working hard on delivering one hell of a browser.

The buzzwords for the v3 beta are the same old ones you’ll hear with every release of pretty much every browser, be it Internet Explorer, FF, Opera, Safari or any other: “more secure” – citing the Site Identification button as its most visually obvious upgrade – “easier to use”, “more personal”, and “improved performance”.

The thing is, for the first time since I had a go on the IE5 beta all those years ago, the upgrades are actually noticeable. Even with all my extensions still installed, Firefox 3 beta 5 flies along at an almost scary rate – it really is noticeably quicker; both in startup and in rendering web pages. The download manager has inline search – something woefully lacking in previous versions (though those who enjoy that kind of thing would probably have grabbed the pretty-much-must-have Download Statusbar extension by now). Smart Bookmarks tracks your most-visited pages and does all the work for you, a functionality only achievable in earlier versions with extensions.

One of the most popular complaints with Firefox is its memory leak issue – but right now, with 20 tabs open and numerous downloads, firefox.exe is using a mere 97,000Kb of RAM. Not bad considering if I load the exact same tabs into my current 2.0.0.14 build, I get RAM usage of over 250Mb.

And what’s more, unlike most other betas I’ve been happy to play around with, Firefox 3 has not crashed on me. In 2 weeks. Not once.

Bravo, Mozilla. Download your copy of the beta right here; but if you’re happy with 2.0.0.14 for your casual browsing and fear the upgrade may disable some of your favourite extensions, probably best to wait for the finished article to be released – according to the Mozilla wiki, we can probably expect a mid-summer release!