If you’ve been following the latest tech news, you should know that Firefox 3 beta has been available for a while. Many people have downloaded and used it. But should you jump on the bandwagon and start using the beta version as your everyday browser? Probably not.

I recently took the latest beta of Firefox 3 for a spin, and here is my short review. First of all, it’s fast. Not noticeably fast when loading pages, but faster in benchmarks. I didn’t run the benchmark myself, I found some on review sites a while ago. They showed Firefox 3 beta was faster than Safari for windows, Firefox 2, and of course Internet Explorer. So you won’t notice much of a difference unless you’re loading huge pages.

So since real-world performance is almost not noticeable, I don’t think it’s worth it to give up your extensions. Most extensions still do not support Firefox 3 beta. For me, extensions are a major part of the reason why I use firefox. I say wait until the final release comes out, then upgrade.

As for the well-known memory leak in Firefox 2, that seems to have been mostly fixed. I didn’t notice any difference in memory usage since I have 4GB of RAM, but those of you with 2GB and less will notice.

The conclusion - you can download the latest beta of Firefox 3 here to try it out, but I wouldn’t recommend using it as your daily browser just yet. Wait until the final version is out if you want maximum compatibility with extensions.

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