Firefox 3.5 beta

I’ve been running Firefox 3.5 beta 4, off and on, for two weeks now. I’ve been continually impressed with the speed at which things run. Pages seem to load faster, the UI seems faster, and even the pages themselves seem to run faster. I know the guys at Mozilla and the great community that surrounds them have been working hard to keep Mozilla at or above pace with the other major browsers. So, it really seems like while not too much is noticible for the average user, the underlying browser code seems much more (lets use a techie word here…) “spiffy”.

I’ve really been keeping any eye on memory used by Firefox. I knew Firefox 3 has been reported to have some memory leaks, but I didn’t really notice it until running it after FF 3.5b4. After going back to Firefox 3 (to use a few specific extensions), I really noticed FF 3 starting to drag its feet. I guess I was pushing some kind of max tab limit, but it would continually be chomping away at whatever available memory existed. Almost like pac man. Anyway, I’ve noticed HUGE improvements in Firefox’s memory usage and handling. It compares and (most of the time) beats Safari in total memory use, which speaks volumes to me.

I mentioned before about needing some extensions. Only a few of my more “developer-centric” extensions are able to be used at the moment. I just downloaded an alpha version of Firebug, which every developer using Firefox needs, so I will see how that goes. But I know once FF 3.5 gets closer to release the add-on developers will be doing what they do best.

I’d probably give this test run an A- for being on par with a .5 release!

~ by iamtriptych on May 18, 2009.