I’ve been using the final release version of Firefox 3.0 since it was released a few days ago, and I’ve been very impressed. It is considerably faster than Firefox 2.0, both when first started and after several days of having hundreds of tabs opened and closed (without restart, and often 20 or more simultaneously).

This morning when I fired up my Eee, I got online using my USB HSDPA modem and downloaded the new version. Since my Eee has the tiny 7″ 800×480 display, web browsing isn’t the most comfortable experience, since 1024px wide seems to be the norm in website formatting these days. In Firefox 2.0 zooming was next to useless, and didn’t provide any benefit. I’d resorted to using AsTray to force the display res up to 1000×600, which to be honest doesn’t look good at all.

Firefox 3.0 however has completely changed my Eee’s surfing experience. The zoom function now actually zooms the entire page up or down, as opposed to just making the text larger. Here is a screenshot running FF3.0 at the standard zoom setting on my Eee. I’m viewing a forum which does not fit on the display correctly:

Now look at this image using the zoom function. As you can see the page displays perfectly on the 800×480. Text is perfectly legible, images have followed the text and slightly shrunk, and importantly the page formatting hasn’t been broken.

It’s the same in Word Press editor, which doesn’t quite fit on 800px wide:

I’m still umming and arrring as to whether I will buy an 8.9″ Eee, but as it stands now surfing on the Eee just got a whole lot better!