Earlier this week, I mentioned that Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 1 was made available for public download. In my experience it was definitely much faster and much more stable than the Firefox 2 series.
Chippy over at UMPC Portal has done some speed tests on the latest version, and has made some interesting observations regardarding Firefox 3.0 and netbooks:
Like Safari, it appears from my test results that Firefox 3.0 can process java-heavy pages on a Ghz-class UMPC faster than the data arrives over my 6mbps Internet connection which means that for rich Internet applications, the bottleneck is at the remote server and there’s very little else you can do to speed up the experience. Apparently, java processing in FF3 is many many times faster than in version 2 so this explains the big improvement with online applications. Not only is the speed improved but there are some great features that will appeal to UMPC users too.
Among those features, true fullscreen mode and “Intelligent screen resize” (which allows you to zoom in and out on a website). These features are important both for smaller resolution screens (zooming out to see the entire page), as well as small high resolution screens (magnifying the text).
Read: UMPC Portal
Download: Mozilla.com