My thoughts on Firefox 3 and Firefox 3 Portable after upgrading and living with them for a few days on several computers.
Were you one of the 11 million people who downloaded Firefox 3 during the first 24 hours it was available? They (tenatively) set the record for the most people downlading a single application within 24 hours. I have to admit – I was one of those people. But I didn’t download it for the guiness book of world records. I did it because (as much as I love Firefox) I wanted the performance improvement.
I’m known for having a dozen or more tabs open, and on a Toshiba notebook running Vista on 2GB of Ram that’s not much of a problem most of the time. However, Firefox 2 has been known to “eat all it can” memory wise. Over time, it gets worse and worse, and sometimes you just have to shut it down and restart the computer. I had read in severa pre-release blog posts Firefox 3 had a smaller footprint, and promised to be quicker when rendering pages. Hmmm…
I first put Firefox 3 on the notebook, and most of my extensions didn’t work – so they were disabled. I just uninstalled them and kept only the compatible ones. Pages do load pretty quick, and opening tabs is faster. The new address (smart location) bar is kinda cool, but takes longer to lookup autocompletes for URL’s and titles – so it’s cool but slower. The one thing I find very annoying is the fact that sometimes when a load heavy page opens, while it’s “loading” the other tabs won’t do anything and FF kinda locks up until that page finishes what it’s doing. Other than that my experience was pretty good.
I work on another PC with is a 2Ghz Celeron with 1.2GB of Ram. On that PC I use a flash drive and run Firefox on Portable Apps. I upgraded that to Portable Apps as well. On this PC I have all kinds of issues with Firefox 3. They are mainly the same issues as my laptop, only it happens more often and Firefox is slower. I can’t open more than 5 tabs without waiting 3-5 seconds for everything, and if two or more tabs are loading anything – FF locks up until it’s done. Also, when using the right scroll or backspace in the URL or any form field, it will freeze for 5-10 seconds, and then be fine. I only have google notebook, del,icio.us, and download statusbar as extensions – everything should function fine. Expecially with 1Gig+ of Ram. I almost wished I hadn’t upgraded that Firefox.
Here’s some firefox 3 reviews of the new features from around the web:
If you’re looking for a visual review of all the new features Mozilla Links has just what you’re looking for. Check it out, it’s a very through Firefox 3 Review. For those of you that like to read, the WinSuperSite has a Firefox 3 Review that’s very (wordy) in depth as well.
How do you like the new Firefox 3?
