Mozilla Firefox 2 RC2 Released

Shining Celebi writes "According to the Mozilla Developer Center, Firefox 2 Release Candidate 2 is available for download. This looks like it could be the final release candidate, and offers a tweaked UI and improved stability over RC1, plus, of course, all the new in Firefox 2.0 features."

Comments

Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RAM.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been using the x86 Linux release all day today. And unfortunately, it still feels slower than Opera. From my quick measurements, it also seems to use more RAM.

I had been hoping that Firefox 2 would be able to better compete with Opera. I was hoping that it would render faster, while also consuming far less memory. My Firefox 2 RC2 process from early this afternoon ended up hitting about 650 MB of RAM (measured with top) before I had to kill the process. And that was only after about three hours of use, in total. I didn't have any non-default extensions installed, so they aren't to blame.

My computer only has 512 MB of RAM, and I'm not in a position to purchase more. If Firefox 2 leads to my system thrashing after only several hours, then I don't think I'll be able to use it. Opera, on the other hand, only ever seems to ever consume 80 MB or so. I can't recall ever seeing it above 100 MB.

I really like the extensions of Firefox, many of which Opera does not offer. But Firefox suffers from some pretty severe memory management issues. Those in turn may lead to degraded system performance, even on computers with 512 MB of RAM, running Slackware 11. Unless Firefox deals with this excessive memory usage, I don't think I'll be able to use it on my system. Meanwhile, Opera functions without such problems, so I'll continue to use it until things improve with Firefox.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[kruhft]

I almost gave up on firefox, but I gave it one last shot and attempted to build my own from CVS. After upgrading to gcc4 to eliminate the link errors that occure with previous versions, the build went smoothly with the following ~/.mozconfig:

. ~/data/mozilla/browser/config/mozconfig
ac_add_options --prefix=/usr/local/stow/firefox-cvs
ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-march=pentium4 -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math -mmmx -msse -msse2 -mfpmath=sse,387 -pipe -funsafe-math-optimizations"
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --enable-default-toolkit=gtk2
ac_add_options --enable-xft
ac_add_options --enable-freetype
ac_add_options --disable-postscript
ac_add_options --disable-gnomevfs
ac_add_options --disable-gnomeui
ac_add_options --with-pthreads
ac_add_options --disable-ldap
ac_add_options --disable-xprint

This config made a world of difference in the usability of firefox, and I'm sure the main speedups are from using the native gtk2 toolkit rather than chrome/xul. For those that aree unhappy with the slowness of the default builds, I suggest trying something like this; it makes a world of difference.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[aiken_d]

I have a stock firefox install with no extensions, and it routinely consumes up to 2GB of memory (on a 4GB system) before I notice things grinding to a halt, and I kill the process and start a new browser. A day or two later, it's back up to 2GB of memory usage, with maybe 4-6 tabs going.

But I suppose my experience isn't valid, since I'm just "trying to make firefox look bad" because I've got nothing better to do with my time, eh?

Thing is, one of the reasons I (like so many other people) was so anxious to switch off of IE was Microsoft's arrogance and disdain for their users. Unfortunately for all of us, the "you become what you fight" principle seems to be in effect here. I still use firefox because it's the best overall browser, when it works. But the fanboys who engage in personal attacks on anyone who runs into difficulty sure don't help the browser's image.

-b