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Mozilla has made available the 2nd Release Candidate for Firefox 3 today. Firefox 3 adds tremendous improvements to the previous version. The two features that I really liked is a great performance improvement. Previously if you open up multiple tabs in Firefox, it used to get really sluggish over time. Perhaps that used to happen due to memory leaks that were unaccounted for. The new version really handles this problem well. Another improvement that I liked is that previously if you had a network interruption while downloading a file using firefox’s downloader, the browser used to show the download as completed. You used to know that the downloaded file is corrupted and was not downloaded properly when it didn’t used to open up.  The newer version now automatically understands whenever such hiccups occur during file downloads and allows you to resume the file to be downloaded.

The new version will really boost up firefox in its competition with Internet Explorer and Safari. Microsoft has announced that the company would be launching IE 8 in august this year, that would also have a lot of enhancements over the current version. Frankly speaking the current version of Internet Explorer is nothing but bloat. On the other hand Apple has recently started bundling Safari with iTunes (see image below). So every time a user downloads iTunes or any updated version of it, he/she automatically gets Safari onto his desktop. This is exactly the strategy that Microsoft used to wipe out Netscape when they started bundling IE with Windows. Becoming default is such a powerful tactic that companies have used it for ages to gain unprecedented advantage over competitors. Apple is copying something that its arch nemesis has done for quiet a while now to gain access to millions of desktops. Studies were already pointing that Safari’s market share is increasing but now with the bundling it would grow at a brisk pace on the heals of millions of users downloading or upgrading their iTunes software. Amid all this fight to gain browser market share, the one company that would gain the most out of it would be Google. As both Firefox and Safari’s search boxes default’s to Google Search. The more that these browsers would gain in terms of browser market share, the more Google will gain in terms of Search Market share. Read our article on the power of default to understand why it is such a killer move.

[ Image source CNET ]