By George Norman - Software News Editor
Added on 30 Oct 2008(951 Views)
Imagine if you will, a browser that offers you the same convenience and cool features as Mozilla does, but does it all at breakneck speed – that is exactly what Minefield is all about. It is somewhat similar to what happens in the car industry: the Mitsubishi Lancer is a respectably good car, but when you take that car and tweak it a little bit you get the Evo, one of the fastest road going cars in existence. To put it simply, Minefield is the next step in Firefox’s future, Firefox Evo if you will.

And now that you have come down from your Minefield high, it is time to let you in on the catch. The following warning message is posted on the Mozilla Projects page: “This is NOT A FINAL OR PRE-RELEASE VERSION. This program is provided without any guarantees of stability, so please use it at your own risk. It is recommended that you back up your profile regularly, as there may be bugs that corrupt your data. If that sounds scary, you'd probably be better off with the latest version of Firefox”.


Still, you should not let that get in the way of you testing this software product. On the upside, it will work on several operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux) and it is quite stable considering the early development phase; on the downside, some extensions will not work properly, or will not work at all.

In terms of speed, it is miles ahead of the competition. It is faster than Firefox, Internet Explorer and even Google Chrome. The TranceMonkey JavaScript engine that Minefield uses is approximately 10% faster than Chrome’s V8 (which is considerable). So if you already tested Google Chrome and found its speed to be impressive, why not get the nightly build of Firefox Minefield and prepare for “Internet tunnel vision”.





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Tags: Mozilla, Firefox, Firefox Minefield

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Comments

George Norman - 30 Oct 2008 21:01
Yes, Minefield is a Firefox 3 build. Not to be confused with the BonEcho builds of Firefox 2.
Jake R - 30 Oct 2008 16:27
Is Minefield Firefox 3?

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