I don’t use the newest computer on the block, in fact my PC is around seven years old.  An HP Pavilion with a 2.10 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM that I’ve upgraded, and an AGP HD 4650 Radeon graphics card that I recently purchased, and to top it off, I’m still on Windows XP with no Direct X 10.  So I often find myself having a hard time as software upgrades, plunging my PC into a bit of a sluggish hell, especially browsers.

Firefox 4 beta addresses a few of the issues I have when using newer software that tends to be ridiculously bloated, and as a browser, I feel it melds a lot of what’s great about Chrome with Firefox.

I know the first question most people would probably ask when it comes to a new version of Firefox is “will it still leave a gigantic memory usage footprint?” And, well, yes, that hasn’t changed much. But performance-wise, Firefox 4 has greatly improved. Webpages load much faster than older Firefox versions and Chrome for me, despite it still being just as bloated with all the crap I added to it before. Flash applications and videos stream and download much more smoothly, and faster. Also, much like Chrome, if Flash, Silverlight, or Quicktime apps crash, you can simply reload the tab without your entire browser going down.

On a newer Windows OS, my performance would probably be even better, since now Firefox seems to support Direct2D on Direct X 10 operating systems. I’d love to hear any comments on your experiences with the OS on newer rigs compared to older versions of Firefox, and Chrome. If they do something about that memory footprint, I think Firefox can really give Chrome a run for its money.

You can grab a copy of Firefox Beta 4 and read a full list of features here.

Tags: firefox, web, Windows