The new version of Firefox became available to the world today at 1:00pm EDT, and at least some early reviews are very positive:
June 17, 2008 (Computerworld) The Mozilla Foundation is celebrating the arrival of Firefox 3 with a worldwide party — and an attempt to set a new world record for the most downloads ever of a single software program. OK, so that’s silly and extremely geekish, but what the heck? Why not kick up a fuss?
Especially because Firefox 3 is the best Web browser I’ve ever seen. And I’ve been using the Web since before there were Web browsers.
And, best of all, it seems like they’re finally getting a handle on memory management:
What was happening was that Firefox’s bad memory management habits were zapping me. For example, Firefox 2.x used different-sized chunks of memory. Then, as it constantly grabbed and released memory, its memory map began to look like a beaten-up jigsaw puzzle. Here a hole, there a troublesome spot where someone had torn off part of a piece to make it fit, and so on.
In addition, Firefox 2.0 kept full-size copies of images in memory. When you displayed a JPEG or any of the other compressed picture formats, Firefox kept the full-size uncompressed images in memory even if you weren’t currently looking at them. Since a single 100k image can eat up a megabyte-plus of memory, this old way of handling images can waste memory quickly.
Mozilla’s engineers seem to have fixed that — or at least improved it — in Version 3. Now, if you’re not looking at an image, it’s been saved in memory in its original compressed format. They’ve also worked on the memory map issue.
Firefox 3 is now using expiration policies in its memory caches. The developers’ thinking is that if you haven’t retrieved a previously viewed page in half an hour or so, the savings in memory by dropping the page from your cache are more important than the small possibility your page will load faster if you retrieve the stale document. (For more explicit information on how memory issues have been tweaked in Firefox 3, a good resource is this blog entry by Mozilla developer Stuart Parmenter.)
The result is that, regardless of any other improvements, Firefox 3 is faster and more stable than its predecessor
Based on my experience so far, I’ve got to agree. Pages seem to be loading much faster than they did in any previous version, and I haven’t had the system slow-down problems that used to crop up after running a Firefox session with several tabs open at once for more than an hour or so.
I’m sure they are quirks to be uncovered. Most notably, there are still a few plug-in’s that aren’t compatible with Firefox 3.0 — the one I’m missing the most right now is TinyURL Creator — but that isn’t all bad either, because three of the plug-in’s that had to be disabled when I upgraded were ones that I hadn’t really made use of in quite some time, if at all, so I uninstalled them.
So far, so good, and, more importantly, yet another reason not to go back to Internet Exploder.
