Just had a very quick play with Firefox 2.0 RC2.

The new icon theme is nice and there are various enhancements to the feed functionality and UI and stuff.

But by far, the best thing about FF 2.0 I’ve seen so far is that it is fast

On an AMD Sempron 2600+ (this is not my main system, a P4 3.0 GHz) it goes from nought to loaded up and ready to go in 1.05 seconds. Compare that to 1.5.0.4 (yes, it’s old because it’s a SLED 10 system and I don’t have any updates on it) which hobbles along and gets there in 2.88 seconds.

I’m officially fired up about Firefox 2.0 now – the only bad thing will be waiting for extensions to get compatibility (though I might resort to tweaking the install.js files if necessary).

(Why am I so fired up about less than 3 seconds? Because it really does make a difference to have your app instantly respond to you.) I’ll have the same for Thunderbird, please (TB 1.5.0.7 is not very quick to start up either).

I like it!

Disclaimer: my timing is in no way scientific, I just used a stopwatch, so they’re probably really inaccurate. But you get the gist, it’s fast and if you still don’t believe me, download it and test it against the latest 1.5.0.x build.