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Is Firefox 3.0 the "Fat Elvis?"

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zridling:
Wired's Scott Gilbertson and Michael Calore ask what happened to their light, tight browser that seems to have gone bye-bye in More Firefox Bloat? Say It Ain't So, Mozilla:

Since then it has attracted millions of users, generally set the agenda for browser development and unseated Microsoft's Internet Explorer as the de facto monopoly in the field. But, with Firefox 3.0 poised for release this summer, the "IE killer" is in danger of morphing into an early Fat Elvis, if increasing numbers of die-hard fans turned reluctant critics are any guide.



For me, Firefox extensions are like drug interactions — use more than 8-10 at a time and memory starts climbing. Otherwise, it's been fine for me.

dk70:
The official information might shed some light http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3 right down to weekly meeting notes or more directly the builds forum at Mozillazine http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=23 Only for the very interested.

Lashiec:
It never wasn't a *light* browser to begin with, it was fast, that's true, but it's a fact that of the three major browser, he is the fattest in memory.

Really, I saw this one coming. Firefox 2 strange design decisions bugged me a lot, they were minor, but these minor things is what makes great programs. And I told to myself that Firefox 3 was the make it or break it release, as Firefox 2 was seen by many people as your regular update, that is, it losts the coolness factor. This was the moment I decided to go full with Opera, and since then I'm in a honeymoon ;D. Oh, I'm so crazy, look what I said LOL. And I was one of this die-hard fans, well, I'm a fan of Gecko since the Mozilla days, so Firefox is the natural evolution.

It's my opinion that the ultimate thing in charge of Firefox problems is the XUL toolkit. Who knows. Anyway, we'll see what happens in the future. At least memory problems would probably be a thing of the past, since they coded a garbage collector in latest alphas.

Edvard:
Pavlov, a Mozilla developer, has a very easy-to-read explanation of the memory-usage improvements made in Firefox 3:

http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/

They not only put in a garbage collector, they used entirely different memory allocation code (Jason Evans' jemalloc), timers for cached pages, automatic flushing of uncompressed image data, and optimized the code for cycle breaking.
The results?
...
Conclusion

Our work has paid off.

We’re significantly smaller than previous versions of Firefox and other browsers.

You can keep the browser open for much longer using much less memory.

Extensions are much less likely to cause leaks.

We’ve got automated tools in place to detect leaks that might result from new code. We’re always monitoring and testing to make sure we’re moving in the right direction.

All of this has been done while dramatically improving performance.
...
--- End quote ---

Fat Elvis? Don't think so, even if the rhinestones and stagelights might still carry a bit of weight...

Carol Haynes:
Interesting article (and hopefully positive future for Firefox).

I use Firefox 2 about 99% of the time and I still like it. Tried Opera but didn't get on with it and missed RoboForm a lot.

My biggest gripe with FF2 is the speed of startup - any news on whether this is improving with FF3 ?

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