I decided to test out Firefox 3 to see how things are coming along, and I’m impressed.

[Update: 20 Nov 07] Firefox 3 Beta 1 is now available.

JavaScript appears to run a lot quicker. It’s on par with Safari 3 now. I tried it out on my flash without flash effects and was pleasantly surprised. I also like how clicking back is almost instant now, much better than the other browsers.

But I really wanted to see how they’ve been doing on plugging up the memory leaks and reducing the footprint. To do that, I used Flock 1.0.1, Opera 9.23, and Gran Paradiso 3.0a8 side-by-side navigating to the exact same pages. I navigated to regular sites, like Digg, YouTube, and Gmail, but I also went to Flash sites, which always gave Firefox a hard time letting go of memory after I was done. Opera was the winner, but Firefox wasn’t too far behind and was definitely improved. Flock was always consuming 40 more megs than the other two, an obvious loser. The end memory consumption after closing all but one tab is as follows:

• Opera: 67,000 K
• Firefox 3: 70,000 K
• Flock: 110,000 K

I also noticed that Opera users only get the old version of Gmail. Poor Opera users.

After Firefox 3 comes out, I’m definitely ditching Flock. It’ll be interesting to see where Flock goes after that, if they’ll stick with Firefox 2 or upgrade to Firefox 3.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 8:25 am and is filed under web development and tagged with firefox, flock, memory, opera. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.