Firefox Loses Some of Its Edge: Mossberg

Mozilla's Firefox is still good, but it doesn't stand out as much as it used to, Walter S. Mossberg writes in the Wall Street Journal. The latest edition of the web browser, version 3.5, works well on both PCs and Macs, but "Firefox has lost its traditionally biggest advantage: greater speed than its rivals." In tests, Mossberg found that it often lagged behind Safari 4.02 and Chrome 2.0.

Second, the new Firefox doesn't include many new features, and "some of them are merely catch-ups to those introduced earlier by Microsoft and Apple." Private browsing mode, for instance, lets you surf the web without leaving tracks—a feature Safari and market leader Internet Explorer already have. Other additions: Firefox 3.5 lets you "forget” any page you've visited, "wiping out all traces you’ve been there," and recovers open tabs if you crash.
(More Firefox stories.)