Slashdot Mirror
Firefox 3 Performance Gets a Boost
jason writes "Mozilla has been working hard at making Firefox 3 faster than its predecessor, and it looks like they might be succeeding. They've recently added some significant JavaScript performance improvements that beat out all of the competition, including Opera 9.5 Beta. And it comes out to be about ten times faster than Internet Explorer 7! Things are really starting to fall into place for Firefox 3 Beta 4 which should be available in the next week or two."
Sounds impressive. I understand they have fixed many memory handling bugs, too. But for me the big problem with Firefox is not slowness with JavaScript.
For me the big problem is the CPU hogging bug. The CPU hogging is much less of a problem with the most recent released version of Firefox, 2.0.0.12, but right now, on the computer I am using to type this, with 17 windows and 88 tabs open, Process Explorer shows Firefox to be spiking up to 75% of the CPU, with no activity.
Those of us who spend a lot of the day doing research, and can't resolve one issue before we must consider another, often have a LOT of tabs open.
I think the CPU hogging bug is very interesting, but I'm not in a position to try to fix it myself. What is interesting is that it seems to be a bug in Firefox that interacts with a bug or shortcoming in Windows XP SP2. So, someone taking the time to fix it may become semi-famous for understanding a severe OS limitation or bug.
What is interesting is that the CPU hogging bug is shared between Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey. Often opening a lot of tabs in Firefox, and keeping them open for days, causes Thunderbird or Seamonkey to begin to hog the CPU, even though those programs are not being used heavily.
The history of memory and resource management in Firefox is that it has been VERY buggy. The Firefox development pages have claimed that they have fixed "hundreds" of bugs. Firefox is no longer unstable, in my experience, but instabilities in the past caused the rapid acceptance of Firefox to slow. People who tried Firefox sometimes went back to Internet Explorer when Firefox crashed, or there were other problems. So, poor Firefox memory and resource management have been a big factor in Firefox popularity, according to numerous news reports at the time.
Firefox on Linux is bad, period. I don't know why exactly.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I already downloaded Camino, thanks.
+1, Insightful.
:)
You should call them fucktards more often