Firefox 2 and 3 on Ubuntu - Night and day

Friday, February 29. 2008

Firefox 2 and 3 on Ubuntu - Night and day

I've been running Firefox 2 with Gutsy since it's release, and using it daily I've only been bothered by a handful of quirks.

1) First and foremost, Flash. Now, the system I do my day to day stuff on isn't exactly a powerhouse - A 3.2 GHz Celeron with 2GB of RAM - but (for me) more than enough. Nonetheless, a single instance of Flash can wreak havoc on my little celery, instantly pegging the CPU to 100% and bloating Firefox up like a balloon. I've tried Gnash as well, without much luck.

2) Occasionally sites with heavy JavaScript will do the same thing, grinding Firefox to a halt with one click. There's not many sites that do it, but a few specific cases perform a lot worse than others.

3) And of course, the glaring memory leaks. Even with zero plugins, opening a few tabs and leaving them open all night would leave me with a 400MB instance of Firefox running. Not good.

Finally fed up with the performance in Firefox 2, I installed the latest beta last night and...

I'm beyond impressed. The difference is like night and day. It opens quicker, and feels much more responsive (even after being left open all night.) Flash no longer constantly eats away at my CPU and RAM and pages don't hang up while loading. Heavy JavaScript and Ajax issues are completely alleviated. And best of all, Firefox's memory usage hasn't gone over 100MB at all - even with 25 tabs open.

So if you're running Ubuntu Gutsy and still haven't checked out Firefox 3, you're in for a real treat.