Opera Mobile has tabbed browsing and opera link (like sync) since almost a year ago and it΄s bloody fast. And it's a beta still since it was a weekend project from the opera guys (I shudder to think what it could do if it was a fully backed project).
Why can't Mozilla get a half decent browser out with so many developers working at it and beta's upon beta's is troubling.
Come on guys microB is much faster (even if lacking in the UI department) and it's Firefox based.
I for one have stopped expecting anything decent from Mozilla (at least for the N900 and Maemo). It's the same as Android's. It's going to need an 1.5 GHz CPU just to run smoothly.
We used to curse Microsoft, Adobe and other developers that made our new hardware obsolete with their bloated software, now it's the mobile Os's and applications turn.
Back to the drawing board guys, you should get some lessons on mobile applications from Opera, Rovio and many guys from maemo.org.

it's not their priority to optimize it for the n900. The n900's lack of memory is what kills it, if you look it uses about 240MB of memory just to load up, so it swaps like crazy and gets slow. It's not that they have to get some lessons, they just are not interested in fixing this problem at the moment.

hey mbrubeck, please ignore rude comments and let us know if we can expect reduced memory usage soon?

all we need now is a swirl zoom add-on.

This beta is the best release so far. It is much more responsive and loads site much faster. My only concern is the startup time. It is too much when compared to microb or firefox.

micro b is still far and away better all around.

everytime they release a new version, i get sucked in to dl'n the 23mb file, installing, expecting something different.

*sigh* nope...

Well, it seems like it's subjective then judging by the varying comments.
Works acceptably well for some, not so for others, I guess it's a matter of preference. For me, as I've mentioned, it's my default browser now as the features make it worth the start-up trade off, although that's not really a problem as on mine it takes...hang on...15 seconds as opposed to....8 seconds for microb, I can spare 7 seconds.

Stick with it though and keep trying as it get's better with each beta.

EDIT...just timed again twice, first time was 40 seconds! then closed, left it a minute and opened, got 26 seconds...that's to a page, not the start up page. I usually just leave it running in the back ground so I don't notice it. Once it's open though I find it loads pages equally as quickly as Microb.

Yeah, Firefox has been my default browser on Maemo5 since its 1.1 release.

I wonder how many MicroB fanbois realize that it is mostly faster because the majority of it is always running in the background via the browserd daemon. The Firefox Mobile team has considered implementing such a feature for Firefox 4, but I'm not sure if anyone has opened an enhancement request for this. I would only want such a feature if I could turn it off. When I close an application, I want all of the memory it was using to be returned to the OS for other running processes.

I'm having trouble installing it.

I have been using Firefox 1.1 regularly, and if I go to
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/m/
and use the download for maemo button, I get a "Fennec already installed" message when the app manager runs.

If I uninstall 1.1 via the app manager, then download the beta from
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/m/
after installation 1.1 comes up again!

I see the link for the stable 1.1 release lower on the page, & no, that's not the link I'm using. It would certainly help reduce stress of wondering if the right link was clicked if the orange button for the beta contained text confirming its version number, even if that didn't solve the problem.

I have the same issue. I can't get anything but Firefox 1.1

@rotoflex and xxxxts
Install it from the ftp. The mozilla repo is broken.
Adress for the nightly build is in the guide below.

@those who want flash
follow my guide. It woks with 4b4 and 4b5pre
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=933094&postcount=1