Aria Rajasa

I ditched Firefox a year ago because Chrome on Mac delivers a very fast experience, I don’t need all the bells and whistle of plugins except for Web Developer plugin and Chrome have a built in tool that’s decent enough, so no complain here. But my mind completely changed after a long talk with Gen Kanai from Mozilla over dinner, he convinced me to check out Minefield, which is a pre-release version of Firefox 4.0. My first impression was one word: superfast!

Yeah, it’s the same response and the very same reason that made me switch to Chrome about a year ago. I can’t believe that I’m running Firefox XD It loads faster than Chrome and it’s pretty stable even for an alpha release. I’ve been using it for a day and it’s been great.

My 2 biggest complains on Chrome is that it crashed a lot when Flash is being played and the Interface and behaviour is not very Mac-like. Minefield provide a Mac experience with a blazing fast speed, this is awesome.

Currently, my biggest concern is memory leaks on Firefox (yeah it’s a feature, not a bug) and I would like to see how it stand the test of time so I’ll be using Minefield exclusively for a week or two to stretch it out and see how it goes. Hopefully it’s as good as Gen said it is.

PS: You can download and test Minefield yourself by downloading it from the Firefox Nightly Builds. If you decide to download it, I would definitely like to know what your responses on this :)