As my profile will tell you I'm an experienced Linux user and a Web Developer, so browsers are important to me. When Google released Chrome I liked it so much I actually started booting into Windows again just to use it. You may think it odd that a browser would make me do this but I love Chrome. It's super fast and so minimalistic but brimming with quality and ease of use.

Then yesterday Minefield is brought to my attention. It's simply the codename for the alpha release of Firefox (so it's not recommended for general use). Some reports say it's up to 10% faster than Chrome and it seems faster than Opera too. It doesn't really matter how fast it actually is though because it feels fast and loading up all my tabs took nowhere near as long as I'm normally used to.

So what makes Minefield so much faster? It has a hugely improved Javascript engine and the rendering engine has clearly had some work done too. Obviously Chrome still has the usability and minimalist edge, but now I feel like Firefox is poised to take back the speed crown. Minefield is also slowly nudging higher and higher in the Acid 3 test but it's worth pointing out that while rendering speed is much faster, memory usage appears to be about the same. The amazing thing to me is that Minefield has all the features we already have in Firefox 3 and is still so much faster. Hopefully...

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