Firefox 3 Memory Efficiency

Published on June 25, 2008 By kryo In Personal Computing

More Firefox news today! Some of you may be aware of Firefox's notorious record for memory usage in older versions--slowly growing throughout the day to the point that few dark corners of your RAM were free from its grasping tendrils. Happily, it looks like those days are now over.

Programmer Sam Allen of Dot Net Perls has released the results of some real-world usage testing of Firefox 3 and other current and upcoming browsers, and Firefox users will find the results quite pleasing: FF3 appears to be far better at using less, and cleaning up no-longer-needed memory than previous versions (usage remained low and fairly steady throughout the testing session).

Better, it now seems to use overall less than IE8, Opera 9.5, and Safari for Windows, if Sam's usage was consistent between browsers (I'd place less stock in these conclusions, in any case).

I'm a heavy Firefox user myself--my forum rounds typically see hundreds of tabs coming and going throughout a day-long session, so this is great news to me. Even more, it makes Firefox an even better option for low-end machines where memory is at a premium. Just one more reason to switch, if you haven't already.

This concludes this week's Firefox evangelism post

Comments (Page 2)

Loupdinour

on Jun 27, 2008

Now if Microsoft would recognize FF3 as browser and allow the full version of hotmail to be running as it did in FF2

TFLBigBANGtheory

on Jun 27, 2008

Do ActiveX controls work in FF3?

Mistralok1

on Jul 03, 2008

How do I get rid of that drop-down from the address bar? I can't find any option for disabling it, or even clearing it out.

Try this.

Thanks, Kryo, but that wasn't quite what I was looking for. I am going to leave it installed though, because I much prefer the old look to the new one.

After a bit of searching, I found an add-on that does the job. It's called "Hide Unvisited". It basically restores the functionality of FF2; in other words, when you clear your private data, the location bar is cleared out also. You can find it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7429

Sorry, but I can just not get it to link up. You'll (if you are interested) have to c&p it.

Kitkun

on Jul 04, 2008

After a bit of searching, I found an add-on that does the job. It's called "Hide Unvisited". It basically restores the functionality of FF2; in other words, when you clear your private data, the location bar is cleared out also. You can find it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7429Sorry, but I can just not get it to link up. You'll (if you are interested) have to c&p it.

Thanks. I was looking for something like that.

Mistralok1

on Jul 04, 2008

Just spreading the love.

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