Comments for Firefox 3 Beta Hits the Web - Faster, But Still a Memory Hog

Firefox 3 Beta Hits the Web - Faster, But Still a Memory Hog

2007-11-20T16:09:58Z

Last night, Mozilla released the first public beta version of Firefox 3. You can grab version 3.01b from the beta download site. According to Mozilla, the new release has fixed over 11,000 bugs as well as made the move to the new Gecko 1.9 rendering engine.

My first impression of Firefox 3 Beta was, "This doesn't seem very different." After playing with a while, though, I started to notice a few changes -- mainly for the better. First on that list, Firefox 3 is fast. The release notes cite "major architectural changes" that have increased speed, and promise things will only get faster with each beta.

Pages definitely loaded much faster in 3.01b than they do in the current non-beta release of Firefox (2.0.0.9), to the point where I was actually surprised when some often slow-loading pages jumped right up. For me, the improved speed is probably the most noticeable change while using Firefox 3 for regular web browsing, and is certainly a welcome one. Other changes that caught my eye include the rewritten download manager that lets you resume downloads (hooray!), integration with anti-virus software and built in malware detection, the ability to save tabs when restarting the browser (no need to force quit to do that anymore), single click bookmarking, and a simplified password manager.

]]> Unfortunately, one issue that still exists in Firefox is memory leaks. According to the release notes, developers plugged "over 300 individual memory leaks," but still after just a few minutes of browsing with just 8 or so tabs open, Firefox was using over 150mb of RAM -- and I often have 20 or 30 tabs open while writing and researching stories. Duncan Riley at TechCrunch noticed the same thing.

In the end, I've switched back to Firefox 2.0.0.9 because none of the plugins I use on a regular basis work yet in Firefox 3. Eventually, though, the faster page loading and file download resuming will make the switch worthwhile. Here's hoping they fix those memory issues while they're at it. There is much more on Firefox 3 Beta on Techmeme.

Comment from Ryan on 2007-11-20

2007-11-20T18:36:28Z

They definitely need to fix their bugs but I can't complain about the price of the software ;-) Memory is cheap and is the gift that keeps on giving... load up.

Comment from boris on 2007-11-20

2007-11-20T18:42:37Z

Thanks, for the info. I will give it a try. I did not realize that speed problems were related to Firefox. Even a slow Firefox is better than IE.

Comment from Ray on 2007-11-20

2007-11-20T19:51:21Z

I found that it trashed my old bookmarks when I tried it. Luckily I had a backup of them. Also, the page rendering will slow down when the extensions start catching up and you install them.

Comment from yellek on 2007-11-20

2007-11-21T00:24:56Z

In the past I have found that most, if not all, of my extensions just worked in the new beta. The only thing required is to override the version check that they do which will not include the new beta version. To do this you can install the Nightly Tester Tools extension. I'd be interested in any extensions you found that didn't work after using Nightly Tester Tools.

Comment from Robert O'Callahan on 2007-11-21

2007-11-21T08:40:27Z

Observing that Firefox is using 150MB of memory at some point in time does not tell you anything about whether there are memory leaks. It doesn't even tell you whether Firefox is a memory hog unless you have compared memory used loading the same pages (in the same order etc) in other browsers.

Comment from Andy Roth on 2007-11-21

2007-11-21T15:43:36Z

Does this mean there are at least 11,000 known issues in the current release of Firefox? Yikes!

Comment from Asa Dotzler on 2007-11-21

2007-11-21T21:19:16Z

We've found and corrected a problem with the updating of our Phishing Protection list that was causing large amounts of RAM to be consumed and CPU to spike. The problem was the server sending information to Firefox in the wrong format.

You can read more about it here
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2007/11/firefox_3_beta_1.html

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Comment from Asa Dotzler on 2007-11-21

2007-11-22T01:37:19Z

Not quite. What Duncan at TechCrunch saw was a known and fixed issue

Starting yesterday, we began receiving reports, like Duncans, of a new memory/cpu usage issue that happens shortly after a normal startup and can spike the CPU and chew up hundreds of MB of RAM. This is apparently happening to people with new profiles or in profiles that have a very outdated list of bad sites for the Phishing Protection feature and the Malware Protection feature.

What's going on is that soon after Firefox is started, Firefox tries to fetch updates to the site forgery and malware lists -- the lists of bad sites that allows Firefox to warn users about suspected Phishing and Attack sites. If the profile has very outdated or no local lists, as is the case for a new Firefox profile, Firefox is trying to bring down these rather large lists in one big chunk rather than slowly in small chunks. This causes Firefox to consume large amounts of CPU and memory and can slow the users machine to a crawl.

This problem is due to the change in the "SafeBrowsing Protocol" which only affects Firefox 3 Beta 1 and nightly build users. If you're on Firefox 2, this isn't going to affect you.

The work-around for this problem was for us to throttle it on the server side. We've done that and if users that were seeing massive (500MB+ and CPU spiking for minutes at a time) problems try again, it's probably working fine now.

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