Firefox is becoming more of a clunker.
It has become bloated, slow, and is still a memory hog.
I recently ran a ISP speed test out of Firefox. Latency was in the 200ms range. The same test using Chrome shows the latency in the 60ms range.
I currently use Firefox 3.6.3. I tried some of the later versions, and they were so filled with crap that they would no longer run on my old XP computer.
Firefox and plug-ins have nice features, but it is becoming a monster to use.
I had latency problems too until I watched in TCPView and noticed firefox opening all sorts of stupid http connections before it did the one I asked for. So I went into about:config and blew away all strings starting with http. Basically I told firefox to not look anything up except what I wanted.
The ones that probably made the most difference were browser.safebrowsing.* Thanks much firefox, but I think I can decide what it safe to browser better that you can...
I have had problems recently with Firefox: took forever to load and kept crashing on me. Finally uninstalled it and reinstalled 3.6.13 and haven’t had any further problems.
I like Firefox for the plugins like noscript, ad blocker plus and taco. I love the ad blocker feature that replaces ads with your selected pictures folder so that ads on lefty sites are replaced by mine mocking obama.
“Firefox is becoming more of a clunker.
It has become bloated, slow, and is still a memory hog.
Firefox and plug-ins have nice features, but it is becoming a monster to use.”
Indeed. Each release is worse than the last. My guess is eventually FF will simply be crushed to death under its own weight. FF’s only redeeming value is the many fantastic productivity plugins, and in fact, that’s the only reason I use it.
I can deal with the slowness, but the memory issue is killing me. I finally went back to 3.0.13, changed about a dozen hidden config settings, disabled almost all plugins (especially silverlight), set Adobe Flash to always ask when it wants to store data, and then I keep an eye on memory growth with statusbarex, and periodically minimize all FF windows manually with the actual minimize button (having set config.trim_on_minimize to TRUE in about:config). This actually works to trim memory, at least in 3.0.13. It didn’t seem to work for me in later versions. I’m pretty sure sliverlight and adobeflash were among the worse offenders, but by no means are the only things causing explosive and unmitigated memory growth. (Ramback didn’t work for me, and Memory Fox’s afom.exe prevented Office 2000 programs like word and excel from opening.)
At any rate, given the millions of google hits on the memory issue, it obvious the FF developers don’t know how to fix this problem or don’t care or both. They seem to be too busy larding FF up with useless bells and whistles.
That being said, I can’t live without it because of certain extensions. However, I can’t really recommend FF to Mom and Pop type non-techies.
I haven't checked on that issue in a while. I have a VM here, let me check. Oops, IE is a bit out of date, so it's IE7 vs. Firefox 3.6.
IE
Open blank: 14,056 MB
Open CNN in the tab: 48,644 MB
Open Fox in new tab: 71,756 MB
Open ABC in new tab: 96,256 MB
Firefox
Open blank: 32,458 MB
Open CNN in the tab: 60,342 MB
Open Fox in new tab: 73,036 MB
Open ABC in new tab: 81,896 MB
Firefox opens obviously memory hungry. However, I have always suspected that might be because IE leverages some OS components (like explorer.exe) instead of having to use them in its process. I suspect the same for Safari on a Mac too.
But then notice that after three tabs, Firefox uses less memory than IE. Strange. But I haven't tested memory usage over time after lots of browsing, and I seem to remember that was a problem with Firefox.