Late last night, I installed Firefox 3 Beta 2. I’ve been running it all day, opening and closing tabs throughout, with a peak of around 45 tabs open, and an average somewhere around 25-30.
I don’t know what they’ve done to improve the memory handling (it’s currently using 394M virtual, 161M resident, 19M shared), but the responsiveness has been awesome. In Firefox 2, my machine would have been thrashing like a dying wildebeest, slogging down the performance of every other app on the machine. But with version 3, Firefox itself has remained snappy, and switching between Firefox and other apps (Thunderbird, Pidgin, Skype, and a handful of terminal windows) has been just fine.
Of course, it could just be the fact that only 6 of my 43 installed add-ons is working right now… I’ll be keeping an eye on that. Maybe I should try running Firefox 2 tomorrow with a fresh profile, and see if the lack of add-ons makes a big difference after an extended session.
There’s also a few changes in the UI, that I mostly like. Such as the ability to bookmark a page by clicking a little star icon on the right side of the location bar. And scrolling through a long list of tabs is much smoother now. Plus, the active tab stands out from the others much better. That’s all I can think of for now.
Anybody else out there giving the new beta a test drive? What do you think?
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4 Comments
I’m holding off on the install for now, as I don’t want to deal with my wife when it goes buggy on her.
Just wondering about the adoption of the star icon for bookmarking. Is it similar to the star that IE7 implemented? And if so, is this Mozilla’s way of paying back Microsoft for graciously adopting the standard RSS beacon logo?
YES, Firefox is the only way to go… as far as having that many tabs open…. I think you are crazy if you have the need for that many tabs open…. I usly have 4 – 6 tabs open. I though I had a lot!!!
If they have sorted out the memory problem I may give it a try. I currently can’t go longer than a couple of hours without needing to restart it. Hopefully you aren’t right about it being related to the missing add-ons.
Do you have any information on when FF 3 is actually going to be out? I am always very annoyed at the memory usage of FF 2 and I don’t have many add-ons installed.