Last week, Rich made a post about Netscape 9. Netscape 9 is based on the Firefox core, but has a lighter footprint. This evening I ran across something else I thought I would bring up: Firefox Wonder Edition.

Firefox Wonder Edition is a stripped down version of Firefox. It is also fully portable which means you can move it around and simply run it as a self-contained EXE file. When you download it, you un-zip it and you will get a folder. What I noticed is that the main EXE file read as a PortableApps file, so I guess this is something that is available on PortableApps.

The browser is indeed snappy and lightweight. One of the major reasons it is fast is because it uses the NoScript add-on which will only run javascript on domains you put onto a whitelist. When I checked out PCMech.com in Firefox Wonder Edition, everything rendered as usual but all javascript was disabled. It was, though, extremely fast.

I love Firefox, but one of my beefs with it is that it is a real resource hog. Especially if you use add-ons because Firefox loads up all add-ons into memory whether you are using them or not. I haven’t yet tried out Netscape 9, but Wonder Edition seems to me to be the epitome of lightweight Firefox.