[TriLUG] Firefox 3

Heath Roberts htroberts at gmail.com
Thu Jun 19 15:15:20 EDT 2008


On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 2:24 PM, Kevin Hunter <hunteke at earlham.edu> wrote:

> At 1:18p -0400 on Thu, 19 Jun 2008, Douglas A. Whitfield wrote:
>
> > 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.
>

I have similar experience. FF3 isn't perfect, but it's better than FF2 or
IE.

I'll typically have about 15 windows open with a total of maybe 180 tabs,
and whereas FF2 would take about a week to get so bloated I would have to
kill & restart it, FF3 takes 2-3 weeks. When I do kill it, I might go from
900 to 250 MB  for the same set of open web pages. FF2 would take 5-10
minutes to reload all that, and FF3 typically takes less than a minute.

FF3 is *much* faster, too. When FF2 got bogged down, it would take several
seconds to open a new tab, or a right-click menu. FF3 does those tasks
almost instantly.

Several colleagues have complained about FF3 crashing, but that seems mostly
to be Flash-related. I suggest they install flashblocker, which I use, and
they've all reported improved experiences.

-- 
Heath Roberts
htroberts at gmail.com



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