Faster than ...more secure on firefox 3

There is a clear sense of anticipation building at the Mozilla Foundation's headquarters in Mountain View, California where engineers have been working for the past 34-36 months perfecting Firefox 3.0.

"This is the biggest release by far of Firefox," says Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at the non-profit that drives the web browser's development.

"We couldn't have done it without the two million people around the world already running it and the other 20,000 helping give us feedback, working out the bugs and constantly refining it," he said.

Mr Schroepfer said Firefox 3 promised to be faster, easier to use and more secure than rival browsers.

He claims that Firefox 3.0 loads webpages three to four times faster than Firefox 2.0 and more than seven times faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE).

However, with all manner of factors beyond Mozilla's control affecting browsing speed those claims may prove hard to sustain.

Alongside the speed improvements goes the "Smart Location Bar" - a feature known as the "Awesome Bar" internally at Mozilla.

The feature gives the browser's address bar a mechanism for quickly returning to web pages without bookmarking them, even if a user doesn't remember the address. It can also search "tags" - keywords that users associate with a particular page.

Mr Schroepfer told the BBC: "It's an arms race between the good guys and the bad guys. This is not scare tactics or boogie man kind of stuff.

"We have seen a huge uptick in malware attacks because they are financially motivated," he said.

"This is billions of dollars a year. There are clear incentives for people to do this because they make money so you need some good guys on your side to block them out."

Included in Firefox 3.0 are malicious software spotters that tell users when they are on a website that has been compromised. A red box will pop up in the middle of the screen warning users of the danger.

"Our goal because we are non profit isn't world domination," said Mr Schroepfer. "It's just to make sure the internet is open, collaborative, competitive and innovative."

taken from .... http://news.bbc.co.uk