Firefox 3: Day 2

Firefox-3

Going back to work this morning only to be forced to use Firefox 2 almost seemed cruel. The specs of my work laptop is almost identical to that of my desktop- and the difference between the two versions was painfully obvious.

To give 3.0b3 a 'real world' test- I left the browser open all day with anywhere from 6-8 tabs open- including cnn.com, which autorefreshes every several minutes. cnn.com became a real problem for me in Firefox 2 because if I left the tab open, eventually the browser would consume memory and usually result in the browser freezing- and occasionally the entire computer to seize. In my 'mini-test' I included pages that are highly graphic and flash-intensive- like gonintendo.com.
Under Firefox 2, leaving this kind of setup running for a day would consume anywhere from 58-95% of the memory on my system- often resulting in a lot of memory swapping (especially changing tabs), and occasionally freezing the system entirely.
With Firefox 3, memory usage has remained consistently under 15%!!! That's a massive jump in performance.
True- I don't have any themes loaded, and almost none of the extension plug-ins work, but I can't imagine extensions accounting for a a minimum 35% difference in memory usage. If these kinds of numbers keep up in the final version with extensions loaded- then bravo to the Mozilla team for solving a serious problem with Firefox 2.
And CPU usage too seems to have been tamed significantly as well. Firefox 2 was typically using- at least 15% CPU usage at *all times*- even when it was just sitting there. Loading a page would easily shoot it to over 90%. Firefox 3, however, has yet to peak into double-digit CPU usage- even when loading pages.

The browser, however, is not without problems. But being a Beta release- I'm not shocked. One obvious issue has been with Vox itself. Formatting and Keyboard Shortcuts no longer work. You'll notice there are no italics, bolds or underlined segments of text in this post. Even highlighting a section of text and manually clicking the bold 'B' icon above the Vox composer does nothing. Image placement is also not working. Images are automatically places at the very beginning of your composition- instead of perhaps placing one mid-way through the text, right-aligned. It won't happen.
I also visited netgear.com tonight (yes, researching routers) and that was when the beautiful scrolling that I mentioned last night came to a screeching halt. While on netgear.com, the page was **extremely** choppy while scrolling. Completely unusable afaic. Memory usage did not increase- but CPU usage sure did. Shooting well into double-digits to the tune of 50-60% (still, a far cry from the 90+% I've experienced with Firefox 2).

I do hope that theme and plugin maintainers will begin updating their respective contributions to the 3.0 platform soon, and that Mozilla has plans to release a final version sometime this spring. I looked on mozilla.org- but didn't see anything referencing a specific date of release for a final version.

24 Hours in- and I'm definitely impressed. I can live without my themes and plugins for now. I'm *never* going back to Firefox 2.