Lately, stable versions of popular browsers have been leaving a lot to be desired, and it feels like they aren't efficiently taking advantage of available hardware resources. Add to that the news that Mozilla has once again delayed its 64-bit build for Firefox, and the next step is to head to the frontier and explore what alternative projects have to offer. One of them is Cyberfox, with dedicated versions for Intel and AMD, in 32 and 64 bits.
The arrival of Edge in Windows 10, Microsoft's experiments with a JavaScript-based browser and recent optimizations for Google Chrome 45 all convey that not everything is well in the browser market. In fact, I believe we're going through a stagnation phase. In Redmond, they concluded that Internet Explorer's situation was unsustainable, and Edge is supposed to change things... but without the promised extension support, its potential is shackled. Meanwhile, Google acknowledged the memory issues in its Chrome browser, but it will need much more than a couple of optimizations. And where does Firefox stand? Honestly, we have no idea. The benefits of its cumulative updates are practically hardly felt, and as if that weren't enough, its 64-bit version has been delayed once again, courtesy of a problem in the NPAPI sandbox process and the accursed instability of Adobe Flash. The new estimates point to December... but something tells me we won't see it this year.
Introducing Cyberfox
Luckily, there is life beyond the official radar. Projects take Firefox's code and create their own variants. I'm sure our readers already know Waterfox, but today we're going to talk about Cyberfox, a kind of 'competitor' in many ways. To begin with, Cyberfox offers 32-bit and 64-bit versions, much more stable than we expected. Second, Cyberfox is available in builds optimized for Intel and AMD processors. The differences aren't usually too big, but if there's an extra feature to squeeze out performance, we definitely want to use it. Finally, Cyberfox's development keeps pace with the original code. The latest edition is based on Firefox 40.0.3 and comes with all the security fixes.
As for performance, I must say there are no complaints on this side. Cyberfox handles multimedia content just as well as its official sibling, SunSpider tests put it in a technical tie, and I see it a bit more respectful with RAM usage, but that was in a controlled environment with few extensions. Cyberfox creates a parallel profile to Firefox, and also has portable versions, so you can try it without compromises or permanent installations on your system.
You can download Cyberfox from its official website.
