When Mozilla invites you to download Firefox 3.5 oblige.
While it did take me several minutes to download the file this morning, the result seemed worthwhile.
All my regular add-ons loaded right away — your mileage may vary. I did find performance improved across the news sites I regularly visit. Even the most file-heavy such sites, like Weather.Com (with its time-release weather maps) moved well.
By contrast I had grown accustomed to a white bar near the top of Firefox 3.0. This was a visible sign that it was having trouble loading content.
I usually keep a half-dozen tabs open at any one time — prospective stories, mail — and run several other programs at the same time as well. My system tray is filled with crap that loads at start-up some of which I never use. And the main Windows machine here has moved twice with PC Relocator, which brings my crap along with my software.
In short this is a bad, dirty nasty naughty PC, with a highly fragmented hard drive and a lot of other programs fighting for processor attention. If Firefox works well here and (so far) it does, imagine what it can do on your nice, clean, obedient and well-tended machine.
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