Firefox is back with a vengeance, this time the fight is for real and the promise is that this new vesion is 3 times fasster than previous one, making it lighter and more mac friendly and at the same time giving some punches to Safari.

Mozilla cried foul when Apple pushed Safari for Windows as an iTunes Update, a strategy that put Safari in the face of thousand iTunes users that have fallen in love with the ipod, this move received raw criticism from Mozilla Ceo, John Lilly, who qualified it as a threat to web security. It seems that Apple learned something from Microsoft and is using it with Windows users.

While Internet Explorer is still the king of the hill because its default marriage with Windows, Firefox has been gaining marketshare at its expense, providing more features, solid crash-proof environment and faster browsing, but if Apple can translate its Halo Effect to Safari, bringing million of ipod/iphone users to the new browser, then Firefox fight will be in two front, trying to grab marketshare from IE in the first place and trying to maintain it while fighting with Apple’s Safari.

True to be told: In my experience Firefox 3 is faster in Java related stuff on mac, looks more mac friendly and provides thousands of add-ons that make it more useful, Safari browsing experience is more pleasant in both platform, but Firefox 3.0 is getting closer to provide the same level of browsing satisfaction.

Emboss effect makes Firefox looks unpleasant.

Added details to the recently visited sites.

Check the details: There are only few visible differences between Safari (up) and Firefox 3 (down). Firefox now looks more like a real mac application.

There is not doubt that Firefox 3.0 will give Microsoft an even bigger headache, it is clean, faster, lighter, professional looking and is out to take the browser war to a new level. The only thing I don’t like is the emboss effect applied to the links bar, it gives a sensation of rupture, that there is other window below or that this is the upper side of the windows, it is not pleasant. While Firefox 3 doesn’t represent a real threat for Apple, this update must be a wake up call, they are doing their homework and they will do whatever it takes to become the default browser of choice on every platform, on the mac side there is much to do. Keep the good work.

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