[geeks] Firefox regression...

[Eric Railine]

On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 1:41 PM, Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:
> They just release RC3, and now it crashes at least once or twice daily, and
> appears to use a little more memory.
>
> Anyone else notice?

For me, FF3 has been a huge disappointment in general.  The early
betas seemed quicker than FF2, and seemed to use *slightly* less RAM,
but as the builds have gone on they've just gotten worse.  Despite all
the hype about the memory leak fixes & performance enhancements, I see
no improvement over FF2 and the CPU utilization has just gotten worse,
as has I/O.

I find it impossible to use FF w/o it eating up the CPU or using
250-500MB RAM (or more).  While the RAM usage depends on the number of
tabs & the visited sites, the CPU usage doesn't seem to - I have had
it happen with only 2-4 tabs open on sites with no flash, javascript,
etc.  I see it daily on multiple computers running either Windows or
Linux - no apparent difference in performance regardless of the OS (I
haven't run it on OS X in awhile, so I can't comment on that).
Coworkers and friends have reported similar behavior.  The general
rule of thumb seems to be that if your computer starts feeling like a
Pentium I check Firefox - you probably need to kill it.

Before & shortly after FF became the official Mozilla browser (back
when it was Phoenix), it really used to be a fast & light browser and
was the best (at the time & IMO).  Now ... it's still better than any
alternative I've tried, for my usage, but it's not *good*.

As comparison, I've tried the latest version of Opera and while it's
massively better in terms of CPU usage (barely breaking 2% on
occasion) it's RAM usage is even worse than FF (hitting the same sites
& similar usage profile as FF).  And unfortunately not having the
features I find most useful (Bookmark all tabs being the biggest one).

-Eric