Recently I pretty much switched to Google Chrome as my browser of choice on my Windows machine. The feature I liked the most was the speed by far. I use GMail alot now and JavaScript performance is important. Firefox 3 was lagging behind quite a bit by being perceivably slower than Chrome at loading and working with Javascript heavy sites. Thankfully Firefox 3.5 (in particular TraceMonkey) takes a big step in closing the gap.

Firefox 3.5 still does not seem quite as fast too me as Chrome, but it is much much faster than 3.1 was. It’s so much faster that I can now live with it again. I am even willing to give up some of the features I loved about Chrome like the unified URL bar, and the threaded tabs to get access to some of the extensions in Firefox.

As I recently posted I bought a Macbook Pro, and have been using Firefox as the main browser in OS X. So now using extentions like XMarks or the in development Weave Project to keep all my bookmarks and links together.

Firefox 3.5 so far seems like a good upgrade and has once again taken the thrown of default browser on both my systems. Hopefully this fierce competition will continue, and leave IE even further in their dust.