[TriLUG] Firefox 3

[Kevin Hunter]

At 1:18p -0400 on Thu, 19 Jun 2008, Douglas A. Whitfield wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 1:12 PM, Tim Jowers <timjowers at gmail.com> wrote:
>> E.g. Firefox seems to use memory as inefficiently as Internet Explorer.
> 
> I've had zero issues since using version 3 Beta 5, though I haven't used it
> once on Windows and hope I never have to.  But, I am curious.  Are people
> having performance issues with 3?

Heh, define performance issues.  I tend to use the stack method of
working.  This translates to lots of tabs.  There are usually anywhere
between about 20 and 50 open.  It takes about a minute to open and
become usable because of this.  And, even since 3.0 came out, I have to
close it periodically to get back a lot of RAM, roughly once and hour or
so during heavy usage.  This will include because my memory gauge on my
deskbar tells me it's time, because Firefox slows way down, or because
it locks up completely.

To be fair, Firefox 3.0 is *generally* much faster than it's
predecessor, and uses *less* memory.  So it is definitely a huge
improvement, as is my Linux experience with heavy Javascript pages
(Firefox 2.0 javascript in Windows was much speedier that in Linux).
But it still uses a lot of memory.  I don't know what all is involved in
displaying a page (DOM, Images, Javascript, layout, history, etc.) but
why oh why do I get back 400 MB of RAM when I close a FF3 instance with
30 tabs?  That's averaging more than 13 MB per open tab!  Reopening
tends to reset to about 150 MB, or about 5 MB per open tab.  Better, but
still a heavy in my opinion.

I've been using FF3 Beta since early May, and I'd say that it is
definitely an improvement over FF2, but it's still got a ways to go.

Kevin