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Firefox 3 Is Driving Me Crazy – Update 1

Since yesterday, I’ve added Camino to my browser stable and have reinstalled Firefox 2 (but I haven’t tested it yet). Firefox3 resource load keeps moving all over the place. Camino seems to have the smallest footprint of the three, even when it has the most pages loaded. (Currently: 9, Camino; 8, Safari; 3, Firefox).

The Three Browsers After I’d Been Using Thunderbird

browsers_after_tb_mail

FF3 with three windows open (includes a YouTube clip)

firefox_3_windows_youtube

FF3 Truly Idling (three pages, two windows)

activity_monitor_ff_low

To Dbob, I’m on a Mac so I don’t have a “Start” menu and can’t run .exe in native mode, but thanks for the thought! Flock is not my cup of tea. :-)

By Kathy E. Gill

Digital evangelist, speaker, writer, educator. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles! @kegill

5 replies on “Firefox 3 Is Driving Me Crazy – Update 1”

Thanks, Jason!

I’m still amazed at how many system resources are demanded by FF 3. I’ve had one window open (with only two tabs) since Monday: Firefox is using 20+% of CPU. Camino has two windows and a LOT of tabs – but is using 5-6% of CPU. It’s a no-brainer except for the FF extensions.

Related good news: Apple replaced my keyboard and topcase — and it seems like the machine is running cooler and with fewer resources. I can use it as a laptop with no pain!

Finally, someone agrees with me.

Don’t get me wrong, I see some amazing performance improvements in Firefox 3, but on Mac those improvements are more than overshadowed by the introduction of new memory leaks in FF3+. For me, I find the support for Adobe Flash has once again been reduced to a buggy implementation that hangs the browser quite often.

On the plus side, JavaScript window.setTimeout and window.setInterval are far more precise than in previous versions. JavaScript DOM interaction is much faster as well – I would say almost as fast as Safari. With the faster DOM, I was able to create a reasonably usable drawing plugin for Shutterborg, which you can find in the “New” menu when you load the editor:
http://shutterb.org/

– Jason

Sandro – the machine has 4 GB of memory and regularly has at least 1 GB of free physical memory. Yeah. I know. I’ve known Flock since they were beta. Doesn’t do it for me.

But I’m loving Camino! (Except for the fact that FF extensions don’t seem to work.)

It would be interesting to see the System Memory tab on those three screen shots. I’m curious how much you’re living in physical versus virtual memory. My CPU utilization for Firefox is similar to yours but I have a LOT of physical memory on this machine.

Flock is an interesting browser, particularly if you’re into the social networking thing.

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