December 19th, 2007
First Look at Firefox 3.0 Beta 2
The memory footprint of Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 is similar to that of Beta 1 - page for page, Beta 2 has roughly the same memory footprint as Beta 1, which is a lot less than the footprint of either Firefox 2.0 or Internet Explorer 7. I can see no sign on the spiraling memory consumption that plagued my use of previous releases. Reusing the same tabs over and over for new pages doesn’t seem to be a problem now either. After having Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 running for several hours now without a restart, memory usage is at a little over 18MB with one tab loaded - nice. By comparison, Firefox 2.0.0.11 sitting on another machine is hovering at over 41MB despite having only one tab open, having been used less and having no additional extensions installed.
The only bug (or possible bug) that I’ve noticed is that on one of my systems the menus seems to flash black before being populated. It’s only for an instant but it’s noticeable and annoying. I can’t see why one system in particular would be affected - it’s had Windows newly installed on it a few weeks ago and nothing else is misbehaving on it.
What surprises me about the Firefox 3.0 beta is how many memory leaks that Mozilla have fixed. Complaints of memory leaks with Firefox 2.0 were met with an attitude of “Leaks? What leaks?“ Considering that there have been more than 300 leaks plugged, it’s obvious that past versions leaked like sieves.
If this trend continues and Firefox 3.0 continues to improve and these improvements continue to be present in the final release, I can honestly see myself using Firefox 3.0 as my main browser in 2008. Not because of security, and not because of the add-ons and extensions (these are the main cause of Firefox bit-rot and I’ve vowed to limit my reliance on and use of them) but because it will be a unified browser that I can use across all operating systems. That appeals to me a lot.
Thoughts?
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Adrian is a technology journalist and author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology. He also runs a popular blog called The PC Doctor. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations
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| 12/19/07
