Firefox 3 Beta Answers Some Questions, Raises Others

CRN Test Center downloaded Firefox 3 Beta 1 from Mozilla for a peek to get an idea of what users can expect when Firefox 3 is officially launched. Since this is a beta, the browser is intended for testing purposes only. While no one expects the browser to be production-ready now, if history is any guide, the likelihood of users going ahead and upgrading increases the longer the product stays in beta.

The beta was downloaded onto a Compaq desktop with AMD (NYSE:AMD) Athlon processor, a five-year old Dell (NSDQ:Dell) Inspiron notebook, and a three-year-old IBM (NYSE:IBM) Thinkpad T42 laptop. All three machines run Windows XP. Installation was painless and took less than five minutes on all machines. Bookmarks and profiles from both Firefox and from Internet Explorer migrated seamlessly. However, the browser didn't work well on all hardware configurations.

The Dell Inspiron originally had Firefox 1 installed instead of Firefox 2 because the memory leaks were so severe that the newer browser was practically unusable. Firefox 3 Beta 1 didn't seem to have any of the memory problems. It ran a little slowly, but that was a reflection on the hardware's age and not on the beta. Firefox 2 works just fine on the Thinkpad, but the beta was very sluggish and had moments of unresponsiveness. This could be an issue in the beta or in interoperability with other third-party applications. Hopefully, the uneven experience across different hardware will be resolved by the time the software comes out of beta.

Overall, Firefox 3 looks identical to Firefox 2. The visual differences between the two are fairly minor " most of the changes seem to be under the hood. Some menu options have been removed entirely, or renamed. For example, Text Size in Firefox 2 under View is now called Zoom under Firefox 3. Firefox 3 comes with a DOM inspector, which is very helpful for developers looking at scripts.

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[via crn]

How to reduce the memory usage in Firefox?

Firefox 2.0 since its release had the niggling memory leak and no matter how many updates have been out to address this issue it still has that retard issue. A standard Firefox install without any extensions consumes around 80MB but soon after you add a few extensions you can see a noticeable drop in the performance. There are many guides out over the internet but i have made my own version that seems to work. It gono be a pretty comprehensive guide so you have a stick a little longer to learn the tricks.

First of all make sure you have the latest version of Firefox, presently 2.0.0.7. If you don’t have which i doubt. You can download using the link below, if you are kind enough grab my referral link.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

1. Extension and themes the main cause of memory leaks.

A standard install of Firefox doesn’t seems to show any memory leak issues. But after installing few extensions it seems to show the memory leak issues. Basically this issue occurs due to buggy, bloatware extensions. Also if you overloaded your Firefox with extensions, you can expect high memory usage. Same goes for themes, don’t install too many themes. To minimizes memory issues try testing each plugin one by one for few hours and check over their memory signature. As a result you can always find out the buggy ones and help yourself minimizing the high memory usage. You can even check this comprehensive list of buggy extensions and find out if one of your extension belongs here. Always keep your extensions updated this is another way to cope with the issue.

2) Start Firefox in Safe Mode

If one of your extensions is not in that list, boot Firefox into Safe Mode to disable all extensions and themes. You can do this by going to Start > Run, and entering:

firefox -safe-mode

A similiar looking box will appear .Now check Disable all add-ons
now click on Continue in Safe Mode. Now fire up your Windows task manager and compare the memory usage before and after disabling the extensions. Normally disabling extensions only drops of couples of MB of ram. But if you find some memory spikes this surely indicates some problems of either of the extensions or themes installed.

3) Plugins:

Another memory hogger are the plugins that are needed for open special media or application within Firefox, like Java chat, PDF reader, WMV, Quicktime etc. Here are some links from MozillaZine that offers some basic solutions to plugin related issues.

• Reducing Adobe Reader memory usage
• Shockwave memory usage
• Flash memory usage
• Java memory usage

4) Clear your Download History

[via thinktechno]

(Read here the full guide)