Firefox Beta 4 (Win)

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

Damn, I was going to write the same thing. Looks much faster than beta 3. But Hotmail still doesn't load in the ajax version :(.

Looks like bad browser detection code.

Lots of sites break because they use bad browser detection (Say you need a feature FX3 provides, don't check for FX3, check for Gecko 1.9, so every other Gecko browser works with the site)

The same issue applies to WebKit (people are ignoring the engine and locking it to the browser version)

[Robbie Khan Reviews]

Using Hulu and Neowin, I'm at 121 MB and 93 MB Virtual

Another update: 3.05bpre is using RAM just like Firefox always does. Just 60MB on this site alone. Way to go Mozilla. /sarcasm

60mb? big woop. 60MB is the equivalent of someone stealing 2p fro your coin jar full of ?1 coins.

[Robbie Khan Reviews]

Oh also, is there any way to force my extensions to work? :D

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

You're never going to get no memory usage, images, markup, javascript, etc. take up memory, probably more memory than you'd think (images will do that, so now Firefox only stores the compressed version of images for other tabs that you haven't access for a while)

[Kushan]

I would normally say it's placebo, but this time it's probably not as they did some major improvements to the Javascript engine for this build.

So especially JS-heavy sites will benefit, which would be most complex ones, AJAX'y ones, etc. Things like Gmail and iGoogle.

See more here:

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/03/...eta-4-puts.html

A few on Reddit also tested this against the SunSpider Javascript test suite and got:

- Fx 3 Beta 3: 8215.4ms +/- 1.0%

- Fx 3 Beta 4: 3279.4ms +/- 0.9%

... and ..

Firefox 2.0.0.9 - 23252.0ms

3.0 beta 4 - 7770.4ms

That'd be about a 300% improvement on that benchmark compared to Firefox 2.

It's probably even on par with Opera now, which has earlier been among the fastest browsers on the market in terms of Javascript.

Yeah I read about that a few weeks ago, but I never thought the improvement would be so vast. Just go and use google maps and see what I mean. Previously, scrolling around the city would be a teeny bit laggy, but now it's as smooth as butter =D

I'm quite fortunate, I've had absolutely no trouble with this beta at all, everything works for me and it works well.

[carlskov]

Anyone complaining about 60 MB mem usage should disable their extensions. Obviously you're not gonna get the functionality of 5-10 extensions for free. Which is probably why IE has a bit lower memory usage.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

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

Edited March 12, 2008 by The_Decryptor

[vraev]

I can't believe how fast this version is. I actually decided that I will stick with the beta this time rather than going back to 2 inspite of loosing the support of my big addon list. This is how the "safari browser video showed fast loading". The pages load in a flash. Great job Mozilla. Now...please just make the UI prettier. Also it would be great if they implement the spotlight style focus system when you do an inline search. Smoothing transitions of the browser like safari would also be great. :)

[Kushan]

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

Really interesting read! Thanks for the link.

[Ricardo Gil]

Looks like bad browser detection code.

Lots of sites break because they use bad browser detection (Say you need a feature FX3 provides, don't check for FX3, check for Gecko 1.9, so every other Gecko browser works with the site)

The same issue applies to WebKit (people are ignoring the engine and locking it to the browser version)

I've already tried changing the user agent but still nothing...

[nXqd]

I works much faster. Yay

[Jon 5]

I hope everyone is aware you can go in to about:config and disable extensions.checkCompatibility and your extensions will start working (albeit maybe not working perfectly but most that I use seem to work fine).

Or just get the nightly tester tools addon.

[xdcc]

Is it possible to make the highlighted area look like Firefox 2 with a skin?