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Firefox 7 beta: That's encouraging
Aug. 25th, 2011 11:32 pmThe #1 priority for the next release of Firefox is addressing the memory leaks and other resource hoggery that reached critical mass in Firefox 4.0.
I have found Firefox barely usable on my fairly old Windows XP box with ~1 GB of physical RAM ever since the "upgrade" to 4.0; in particular, opening a lot of tabs, such as my Daily Comics folder or my saved eBay searches, would not merely drag down performance, but would actually crash other applications, especially MediaMonkey and Eudora, as some system resource was exhausted. But even opening just a few tabs could trigger bad behavior.
Well, I took the dive and grabbed the current 7.0 beta, and my minimal testing of it in the last half-hour has been very encouraging. Reported RAM consumption is still high, but whatever other resource it was destroying, it isn't--I've got 40 tabs open and both MediaMonkey and Eudora are running great!
I know better than to trust software, but it's gone instantly from "broken" to "solid". That must be good for something.
I have found Firefox barely usable on my fairly old Windows XP box with ~1 GB of physical RAM ever since the "upgrade" to 4.0; in particular, opening a lot of tabs, such as my Daily Comics folder or my saved eBay searches, would not merely drag down performance, but would actually crash other applications, especially MediaMonkey and Eudora, as some system resource was exhausted. But even opening just a few tabs could trigger bad behavior.
Well, I took the dive and grabbed the current 7.0 beta, and my minimal testing of it in the last half-hour has been very encouraging. Reported RAM consumption is still high, but whatever other resource it was destroying, it isn't--I've got 40 tabs open and both MediaMonkey and Eudora are running great!
I know better than to trust software, but it's gone instantly from "broken" to "solid". That must be good for something.
