Review: Firefox 3 internet browser

Firefox, which used to be the brash young upstart to Internet Explorer's mainstream, is now distinctly mainstream itself. Used by up to 20 per cent of internet surfers (it varies by country) it is a very real competitor to the dominance of Internet Explorer.

But then, with Apple's Safari following hot on its heels, not to mention Google's streamlined Chrome browser, it's also true that Firefox 2 was starting to lag behind a bit, easily becoming bloated with add-ons and suffering a big drop in performance if you used a lot of open browser tabs at once.

Firefox 3, then, has been given a facelift – and it certainly looks bright and shiny – but it has also been hugely enhanced with a new rendering engine that puts pages together faster and with less load on the processor.

A few of the icons have changed, as has some of its behaviour – for instance, when the new anti-phishing protection kicks in you'll see part of the address bar turn green. But once you get used to the cosmetics, there's not much for users to notice. Things load quicker, and the interface itself is quicker to load too.

A handy change to the password manager means you get the chance to see if you've typed in the correct password before having to choose whether to save it.

Overall, Firefox 3 is streamlined and stable, with no problems loading pages in our tests, and none of the crashes of its predecessor. True, it's not quite as slimmed-down as Chrome (look out for a full review soon) but for Firefox fans and prospective users it's well worth the download.