I just tried out the current release of the upcoming Firefox 1.1 "Deer Park" version, and it's very impressive so far. It's drastically faster on startups, and the whole interface seems more responsive. I didn't notice much improvement in browsing or rendering speed, maybe a little, but that wasn't nearly so impressive as the overall performance increase.

The downside is that there aren't a lot of extensions that work with this version yet. You can seriously goof up a profile if you over-install this version over an older version, or if you try to use an existing profile. Anyone wanting to try out "Deer Park" should definitely install to a different directory and create a clean profile.

Overall it's looking very release, and I'm looking forward to when the "stable" release comes out.
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I just read about that one, looks good. The faster startup will be nice, but to be honest it's never really bothered me that much, I just start firefox at the start of a session, and it's not that big a deal to wait a few seconds to have it start up, but it will be nice to have an even faster version.

Firefox is looking really strong, each major release is fixing some pretty large problems. Given that it's now come out that MSIE 7 will not be released for Windows 2000 or earlier, and I'm guessing 7 will not be substantially improved over 6, since they aren't rewriting the core rendering engine, which is now starting to look pretty weak, it's still I believe running some parts of the first IE 4x core rendering engine.

Deerpark, if I remember right, is using the same gecko rendering engine as Firefox, I assume Gecko 1.7.x, or is deerpark using the new Gecko 1.8.x, which I think is still in beta.
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