Mozilla has a secret: It’s called Minefield. It’s their “underground” development project that they stuff full with new, pre-release Firefox features and open it to the “in-the-know” crowd for download (some dinky bland FTP site, even).
A look at Mozilla Firefox: I mean, Mozilla Minefield.
It’s been around a little while; you may have only heard of it recently. The hype comes from the unprecendented “speed” Javascript and rendering engine. While benchmarks can show it is up to 10% faster than Google Chrome (which is worth using, by the way), I’ve had some different experiences.
Most blogs will instruct you to configure it so the JIT compiler is enabled within Minefield for “the fastest Javascript on the planet.” Heck, mine came with that setting enabled already (which makes sense…). So: my take?
Its download and rendering time is pretty crazy. Definitely quicker than Firefox 3, and maybe even Chrome. The Javascript engine, however (the meat and potatoes of today’s modern websites), is a different story.
Perhaps I should configure something (since I haven’t touched about:config except to see the JIT setting), but the Javascript performs pretty poorly for me. I’ve noticed this especially on my own site, where the drop-down menus at the top here actually lag. Chrome is speedy with them but lacking on the image rollovers. Firefox seems to handle both just fine. (So does IE and Opera).
So, I can’t be too impressed so far. I’ll update it once a week or so and see if I notice any improvements… benchmarks or not, though, it should perform well on real websites, not test-oriented ones, before it is released. I don’t usually trust benchmarks.
If you’re a little adventurous, go check it out. It won’t interfere with your Firefox or Chrome installation… just don’t install it as your default browser, and realize that most of your plugins will not work on it.