Firefox 3.6 Beta 5

Mozilla web site ^

[TommyDale]

Less than 60 MB memory being used for Firefox. 59.6 MB to be exact.

[mikrofon]

I’m running the beta in a new install of Windows 7 Pro w/ no major issues so far .... Had to turn Compatibility check Off to run most of my FF add-on’s.

[BigSkyFreeper]

The Skype plugin was my biggest problem. It locked up the computer on webpage loads. I uninstalled the Skype plugin and have had no issues since.

[don-o]

How did you determine that the skype plug was a problem?

[Lee'sGhost]

LOL! The damn thing crashed as I was reading your post. I’m running mine on Vista. Maybe that has something to do with it.

[JoeProBono]

8 Gigs of ram - Me too

[Robert A Cook PE]

Best advantage of my Firefox is the automatic spell-checker on all web pages (including FreeRepublic) with the misspelled word highlighted and a selection of recommendation under the right mouse button.

What are the advantages of going to this version from the current?

[BigSkyFreeper]

How did you determine that the skype plug was a problem?

Troubleshoot.  Disable first before uninstalling the plugin altogether.  If you notice a beneficial performance gain when it's disabled, you can narrow it down to the plugin itself and not Windows or FF. You don't need the Skype plugin, all it does is just makes phone numbers clickable.

[don-o]

It’s me! I have this aura going on....

In attempting to remedy my problems with 3.5.6 I had disbled a bunch of plugins; just leaving what I thought I needed to see videos in various formats. I’m still blazing along here.

[Psycho_Bunny]

Although the memory footprint of Windows has always been a bit high (most often having to do with hardware reservations, third party drivers and what-not) what you describe is a myth perpetuated by people who own Windows machines lacking an adequate amount of RAM.

And frankly, the memory management of 7 is pretty impressive. Even with Cubase 5 Rewired to Reason 4 and Miroslav Philharmonik, I've only been able to push 5.2 Gigs.

Although, I've hit around 20 with a VM server on Win Server 2008. lol

[P8riot]

Been running 3.6b5 for about a week on a Dell Latitude D630 running XP Pro SP2. Zero problems.

[BigSkyFreeper]

For the record, I’m using XP Pro.

[usconservative]

I’m running mine on Vista.

There's your problem right there.

[TomGuy]

Even going back to version 0.7, Firefox has always been a memory/resource hog.

I complained about one of their versions. Firefox Support said it must have been one of the extensions I was using. Since then, I and others have remarked about the excessive memory usage.

It is a persistent problem that they can’t seem to fix.

My Firefox 3.5.4 frequently consumes 160,000K and up. If I run video or open very many tabs, I have to shut Firefox down completely to free memory.

[don-o]

Were you having problems with the 3.5?

[usconservative]

How did you determine that the skype plug was a problem?

Relatively simple for me, it was the last plugin I installed before the problem occurred. I verified it was the problem by disabling it first and re-starting the browser. When the problem stopped I figured that was it. Haven't had a problem since.

[usconservative]

The Skype plugin was my biggest problem. It locked up the computer on webpage loads.

Same problem I had. Disabled the Skype plugin, problem solved.

[don-o]

Speaking of Skype, though - it is an awesome app. What a thrill I got to do my first video call with my Marine a couple weeks ago.

[HAL9000]

I’ve tried Apple Safari. It loads pages slow. Google Chrome is very fast and doesn’t buffer Youtube videos like FF and Safari do. IE8 is relatively fast in comparison to FF and Safari as well.

IE doesn't buffer the video because it is a crap web brower running on a crap operating system. Buffering is a good thing if the operating system is good enough, especially if you want to scrub the video (reposition the time indicator), or store the video.

[nickcarraway]

Try Chrome, it’s way faster...