The Fat Lady Slims Down and Runs 1,000 Yards on First Down!

May 29th, 2008

Firefox v2.whatever was a total waste of bytes. It was a notoriously bloated memory and processor hog, and just an all-around piece of crap. Nonetheless, it was my browser of choice mainly because of its extensability: common extensions such as Web Developer, MeasureIt, ColorZilla, AdBlock Plus, and Greasemonkey alltogether made the browser extremely useful for a webdesigner like myself, and made my everyday browsing experience much better by blocking annoyances and enhancing content. Unfortunately, I began to use Firefox less and less over time because of its innumerable memory leaks (which its developers stupidly claimed to be a “feature” rather than an obvious flaw) and its pathetic performance. In fact, I was ready to give up on it.

So when the first beta versions of Firefox 3 came out, I immediately jumped on them, thinking, There’s no way on Earth that Firefox 3 could be as bad as 2. The lads and ladies at Mozilla were announcing that Firefox 3 was going to be a vast improvement over 2. New features were going to be added to give the browser more functionality by default, but a great emphasis was going to be put on fixing the browser’s flaws. Yeah, right, I figured. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Well, I saw it. And now I believe it.

Firefox 3 (currently available as a Release Candidate) is everything that Firefox 2 wanted to be—in fact, should’ve been—and more. I’m not even going to mention its new bookmarking system or other new interface elements, all of which are meant to be subtle, enhancing the user experience in simple ways; in this article, I simply want to focus on the functionality of the browser itself.

First off, memory usage has at last been curtailed. Firefox still uses up a substantial chunk of memory (generally about 200mb to 300mb), but has never gone above 300mb in either Windows XP or Windows Vista, even with two windows and at least 45 tabs open. Memory usage in Vista is actually somewhat better than XP, but regardless of which Windows OS you’re running, you will notice a significant levelling of Firefox’s memory usage. As I loathe both Linux and Macs, I haven’t been able to test FF 3’s memory usage in a *nix or OS X environment, so I encourage any Linux or Mac users reading this to post a comment indicating FF 3’s memory usage; I’m curious to see how it runs on those systems. I’ll bet that its resource profile is the roughly the same in Linux or OS X, because one of the main goals of the developers on the Firefox 3 team was cross-platform stability.

Firefox 3 is much easier on the ol’ processor, as well. I haven’t noticed any processor spiking since Beta 2, which was a bug eliminated by Beta 3. Even with a variety of extensions, FF 3 is still better on both memory and processor resources than its predecessor.

Firefox 1 was a truly revolutionary application, and rightly began to chip away at Internet Explorer’s pathetic dominance of the browser world. Firefox 2, however, was a de-evolutionary step that no doubt inspired Devo to begin recording again. Firefox 3 is a true evolutionary iteration of the browser.

So go n’ get it already. Even if you’re not the kind of person who likes to jump on pre-release versions of software, I highly recommend upgrading to Firefox 3 if you are an FF 2 user. And if you’ve never used Firefox before, then by all means, check it out now! Even with Internet Explorer 7, and beta versions of IE8, finally showing that Microsoft gives a damn about web standards and user security, Firefox 3 is still a superior browser that will let you do everything you want to do on the Web (and then some) without bogging down your computer.

By Derek C. F. Pegritz on May 29th, 2008 | Scategory: Computer Nerdery |