So a dear friend sent me a screenshot of his desktop just now. It was a screenshot of Firefox with a Mac-look interface. Something that is obviously do-able with UNO in the old Tiger days.

“look at the its firefox and now it looks totally mac,” he said, “alot faster and smaller code overhead now it uses the native graphics engine”.

Apparently he was referring to the latest Firefox 3 beta release for the Mac.

While I am not exactly convinced by his arguments that “Firefox 3 with extensions will put an end to Safari usage”, I did decide eventually to do a little bit of digging around on the Internet for the beta.

Eventually I downloaded the beta, played around with it, and can say that I am impressed…… that Firefox behaved like a Mac app…… which it should have been doing ever it appeared on the Mac.

Seriously, what’s the big deal? Extensions? I’m not exactly a fan.

One big problem with the old Firefox 2 was its crazy memory leak problem. And it appears that Firefox 3 didn’t exactly “kick the old habit of sucking up system resources that it didn’t need”.

One particularly interesting article is by Duncan Riley of TechCrunch, who basically said, “The Memory Use Says It All”. And you know what? I agree with him.

On a side note, thanks to his article now Flock has completely replaced Firefox as my backup browser on the Mac. So long Mozilla, I hope I never see you again.