Firefox 4 is the fastest Firefox yet. With dramatic speed and performance advancements across the board, Firefox is between two and six times faster than previous releases. Major enhancements to the JavaScript engine make everything from startup time to page load speed to graphics and JavaScript performance screaming fast in Firefox.

According to a recent study by extremetech.com, Firefox 8 is already 20% faster than Firefox 5 in almost every metric and has got a drastically reduced memory footprint as well.

Google Chrome has now eclipsed Mozilla Firefox in the speed category. However, I still use Firefox as my main web browser because it is still better than Chrome in certain areas.But just recently, I tried a few tweaks that significantly improved the speed of Firefox making it a little bit snappier than the latest version of Google Chrome when loading webpages.

I was telling you about my issues with scrolling in Firefox (see #6). Well, I didn't manage to fix that for Firefox 3.5 but instead, I installed Firefox 3.6 beta 1 pre (Namoroka) and the scrolling now works perfectly (thanks to Tinhed for the tip!). Also, basically everything feels a lot faster, at least in Ubuntu. This is why I suggest you upgrade to Firefox 3.6.

Firefox 3.0 is not quite a year old, but users are already clamoring for Firefox 3.5. So where is it, and what is it all about?

Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 users are reporting that Mozilla's new browser is dramatically faster than its predecessor – as well as faster than the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari.

"[...]it's official: while Firefox 3 boasts some great new features like a smart address bar and better bookmarks manager, the best reason to upgrade will be for the performance improvements. Firefox 3 is noticeably faster and more stable than Firefox 2 to the casual user and Mozilla engineers have numbers that show it will be the fastest browser on the market."

Sometimes Firefox can become a real memory hog, especially if you keep it running for hours and have many tabs opened. In order to make Firefox a little more responsive and save some RAM memory, here are three tweaks I bumped into over time. Notice that most of these tips only free up some memory at the expense of (usually) loading speed for web pages.

Mozilla today released Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 2, which you can download from Mozilla's Web site. Release Candidate 2 is the first version of Firefox 3.5 that average users might want to run, since it's faster and more stable than the beta versions were. Firefox 3.5 boasts a number of significant changes.