• CNet News.com, Tuesday, June 17, 2008 11:17 AM

Firefox 3 is slated for a Tuesday launch, which CNet says marks the "opening (of) a new front in the browser wars." The Web browser is ripe for an overhaul, author Stephen Shankland says, ready to transform from "a static repository of content into a foundation for applications such as word processors and graphics editors." Indeed, the idea of an "open" Web browser, one that supports a wide variety of plug-ins from third-party software developers, could displace the movement toward "open" Web sites.

Not only that, the new Firefox, with its "Awesome Bar", allows users to type search-like terms as well as URLs and gives faster access to Web addresses. For example, execs at Mozilla (Firefox's parent) claim that it takes 60 milliseconds to change Gmail from showing one message to another with Firefox 3, compared with 413 milliseconds for Internet Explorer 7 and 227 for Firefox 2.

Meanwhile, Firefox is creeping up on Internet Explorer, the Web's dominant browser, having grown to an 18% share, compared to IE's 74%. That's a pretty remarkable stat for an application that doesn't come pre-installed on PCs and has to be downloaded by most users. As Shankland says, the stakes for the browser wars are really high, "with a richer Web coming into being."

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