Firefox 3

[johnridley]

I'm running Firefox 3 Beta 4 (it's in the dev tree, not really released yet - I want to play with the new Canvas extensions).

It's fast. It's faster than Opera, faster than IE, faster than Firefox 2. Rendering is way faster, Javascript is faster, everything I've tried is faster than any of the others.

Memory usage seems about the same. Just having it running sucks down about 45 megs, but I can open a dozen windows and it hardly budges. I can open a window with simple Javascript on it, and it doesn't budge. Opening GMail immediately runs it up to 69 megs; Google has a big Javascript library that loads up. I'll keep an eye on it, to see if the memory use creeps up.

Plugins aren't generally supporting it yet; none of my plugins had compatible versions (ForecastFox, TamperData, AdBlock Plus, CacheViewer, Download Statusbar, Leet Key, Web Developer.

When you shut it down, it has the "do you want to save your tabs for next time you start up?" question, like I guess Opera does.

I'd say to wait a while, they'll certainly stomp a few bugs or memory leaks out, but it looks like they've cleaned and speeded things up quite a bit, when it's released it'll be worth the upgrade (once your "required" extensions are updated).

Comments

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

Is that the version with jemalloc?

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Beats me, I just heard they have a Canvas extension that supports text...like it should have from the beginning if Apple hadn't decided that everything had to be absolutely perfect or they wouldn't do it. "Can't get accurate text metrics" my foot. Just render the damn text. Drawing libraries are pointless without text rendering. The hoops people have jumped through to get around this are just stupid.

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

Ah, here: http://ventnorsblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/beta-3.html

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

Oh, and that closing all tabs thing has been around for a while. Er. It's at least been in all the post-2 releases for a while.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Hm, I've never seen it. Maybe I shut it off early on and forgot. I've seen it when FF crashes (or thinks it has) with "Restore session." Well, whatever.

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I should have said post 2.x. That is, all the pre-3 stuff, 3 betas, etc.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

That explains it. I loaded FF3 Beta 1 - it pretty much hosed my machine; locked up good, every time I launched it. I ripped it out and stayed away until now.

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

I had decent luck with beta 1, but I do agree, 2 and 3 are FAR better. I'll give 4 a look once it's released. I'm really, really impressed with how well FF has been doing.