One week later, it's time for Firefox 3.0.10

It's only been six days since the emergence on the scene of Mozilla's Firefox 3.0.9 -- ostensibly a major security and bug-fix update to the world's #2 browser -- and already the organization is preparing another update. Once again, no formal announcement has been made, though version 3.0.10 has appeared on the organization's FTP site for final preparation.

The emergence of yet another update follows a week of lackluster performance from the production version of Mozilla's browser in Betanews tests. Not only did release 9 lose some speed and performance, we noticed -- as we have from time to time with Firefox 3 -- the re-emergence of a memory leak that can leave the entire browser in the online equivalent of a coma. Release 10 may not have come too soon; already, we noticed a kick in its step, gaining back what it lost performance-wise in Betanews tests, especially in the SunSpider benchmark. Release 10's performance score now stands at 5.19, which is actually higher than for Release 7 -- meaning, combining multiple tests, we find Firefox 3.0.10 to perform 519% better than Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 (not IE8) in the same system.

It's been a tough week for Mozilla, as planners decided to push back the Beta 3 release of its Thunderbird e-mail client by an indeterminate number of weeks, on account of unresolved bug issues ("blockers"). We also still await word on Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, a public release that could be the organization's best performing browser to date.