The upside of this for Chrome (and for Internet Explorer 8, which uses the same technique), is that when an individual tab crashes, only that tab is brought down, and the browser itself remains running. With Firefox, when one tab crashes, it generally brings down the browser.

Firefox has always been bedeviled by poor memory management, particularly memory leaks. In this version, memory management remains somewhat problematic. When I launched Firefox 3.6 on my Vista machine with a single tab open to Google, it used 57MB of RAM. I opened five more tabs to different Web pages, and memory use grew to approximately 145MB.

However, after I closed down those additional five tabs, and stayed on my initial Google page, it was still using 81MB of RAM -- nearly a 50% increase in RAM use over when it launched. Clearly, the memory handling problem still needs to be resolved.

Although this new version of Firefox is mainly about speed, there is a nice new addition to the interface called Personas. are essentially a way to add skins to your browser. Personas change the color and background graphic at the top and bottom of the browse.