Firefox 3.0 beta 3 memory usage

Jim — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:47:31 +0000

I am sure everyone and their dogÂ knows about Firefox 2’s severe memory issues. Version 2.0 was meant to use more memory than previous versions, as it was designed to cache pages in ram dependent on the amount of ram in the machine. Now this was all well and good, but something went wrong and Firefox 2 decided it didn’t like to give memory back — thus, our friendly browser turned into a memory hog.

It’s good to see that Mozilla have targeted the memory issue with Firefox 3, and beta 3 fixed over 350 memory issues:

Memory usage: Over 350 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation. Beta 3 includes more than 50 improvements to memory use over the previous beta.

I’ve done a little test, by running both Firefox 2.0.0.12 alongside Firefox 3.0b3 for about 20 minutes to see how each handled memory under Ubuntu Gutsy. I think this image shows some quite conclusive results:

That’s around half the memory usage for Firefox 3.0b3! Quite remarkable, I am sure you may have different results, after all Firefox is designed to use more memory if you have it — secondly, you will be browsing different sites and using different extensions to me. In this test both browsers had Adblock Plus! and NoScript installed, but turned off.

I’ve noticed Firefox 3 is much more responsive and I do like the extension searching function (sorry Mozilla, I’ve been around since 0.6 so I’ll keep on calling them extensions.) The only problem I have with the browser is the new UI, the Linux look is sub-par — Firefox 2 has a much nicer interface. Whilst the Windows ‘keyhole’ button looks horrendous and so does the attempt at a keyhole on the Mac. Mozilla should provide the old interface with the browser, as the new one fails to deliver. The idea behind the keyhole based button is all well and good, but it needs to be implemented much, much better to be effective; I can see many users simply downloading a Firefox 2 based theme to get rid of the ugly button!

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Post tags: Firefox, Firefox beta 3, memory leaks, Mozilla

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Firefox 3.0 beta 3 memory usage