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. [...]
Download Firefox 3
If you didn’t know already, today is Download Firefox 3 Day. They’re trying to set a World Record for the most downloads in a single day. I read somewhere that the fun begins around 10:00 a.m. PST.
I’ve been runing the pre-release versions for a while, and I can confirm that the memory management and speed are much improved. I normally have about a dozen tabs open at any given time, and I occassionaly have had 40 or 50 tabs going. In Firefox 2, this would cause major memory problems, even after I closed the tabs. [...]