Comments on: Firefox 3 beta: Fonts and Colors

By: SiriusGuy

SiriusGuy — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 19:17:00 +0000

I’ve had great success with the RAMBack extension available from addons.mozilla.org

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/597 …

I saw a noticeable speed up in how long it took tabs to load. I’m one of those ADD people who has a lot of them. Sigh.

By: Asa Dotzler

Asa Dotzler — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 09:13:09 +0000

Trevor, yeah, we’re looking to fix on both ends so this kind of thing can be mitigated even if the server sided goes haywire. It’ll be corrected in the client for the second beta.

- A

By: Trevor

Trevor — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 10:02:34 +0000

@Asa Dotzler:

It’d be nice to see it slowly/incrementally download that sort of data, and while incomplete simply poll the server’s list for the current host or URL on load as a temporary method.

By: Scott Schiller

Scott Schiller — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 18:26:20 +0000

I’ve been working on a redesign of my personal site which uses a significant amount of alpha-transparent PNGs, animation and CSS opacity, and the 3 beta is noticeably faster at rendering than Firefox 2, which is great to see. I did encounter the runaway process/RAM use, but it sounds like the developers are aware of it (thanks for the feedback here, by the way.)

By: Geek Daily

Geek Daily — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 12:35:50 +0000

Nice I’ve been waiting for this. Hopefully thye really have been able to speed things up. Firefox 2 is really starting to chug.

Justin Geek Daily

By: mare

mare — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 00:02:15 +0000

Something is so wrong with Firefox development.. When FF2.0 emerged, I thought it was some late alpha release. With version 2.0.0.9 I still think this browser is not solid and fast enough. I tried FF3b2 and it was an experience I tried to forget. If I could only port Firebug to Opera, there will be no Firefox for me.
I know this is not a useful comment, but it’s better to post it here than to mumble it to myself while walking down the street…

By: Asa Dotzler

Asa Dotzler — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 22:50:24 +0000

Mr. Muskrat,

I think we’ve got to the root of the problem that you and some other Firefox 3 Beta 1 testers are seeing.

Starting yesterday, we began receiving reports, like yours, 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 This is apparently happening to people with new profiles or in profiles that have a very outdated list of bad sites for the Phishing Protection feature and the Malware Protection feature.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 you try Firefox 3 Beta 1 again, it should be fine.

- A

By: Keith

Keith — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 21:40:57 +0000

Jergon – this is a BETA release. The purpose of a beta is to broaden day-to-day usage, allow developers to begin necessary compatibility updates, and identify more bugs, esp. with web site rendering. Performance is not the /primary/ goal yet.

If you read the Mozilla roadmaps, you’ll see that beta releases are intended to be feature-complete, with the goal of performance improvements happening during the beta cycle. When the performance meets or exceeds that of the previous version (and blocking bug count is at or near zero), they begin to issue release candidates.

By: Robin

Robin — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:19:21 +0000

Jergon/Mr Muskrat – are you trying this with a new profile? Really it should be faster and not leak anywhere near as much memory.

By: Marcin

Marcin — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 16:34:18 +0000

Here you check FF3 without installing it:
http://stadt-bremerhaven.de/2007/11/08/portable-firefox-3-beta-1-deutsch/

By: Mr. Muskrat

Mr. Muskrat — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:46:17 +0000

Sorry that should say Firefox Beta 3 (3.0b1).

By: Martin

Martin — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:45:52 +0000

Did they manage to include support for the soft hyphen? Open request since the dawn of time…

By: Mr. Muskrat

Mr. Muskrat — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:45:01 +0000

There are some massive memory leaks in Firefox Beta 3 Release Candidate 1. On one system we loaded it with about:blank and within 4 minutes it had consumed all available memory. On another system about:blank didn’t trigger it but normal usage (4 open tabs: Google homepage, Google Reader, this page and one from Slashdot) caused it to consume all available memory and start thrashing the hard drive as it was attempting to use more virtual memory.

By: Jergon

Jergon — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:15:59 +0000

JavaScript/DOM performance is pretty poor compared to Firefox 2. I really hope this gets addressed in the final version since that would make Firefox the slowest browser after Internet Explorer.