Lights and shadows of Firefox 3

Three days after Firefox's third version of the web browser release I think it is time to write a review about the new software. Downloading it was quite hard at the beginning, since it was released worldwide at the same time and with a lot of advertisement and expecting to achieve a world record for the largest number of downloads in 24h the servers collapsed. After three ours of failed downloads I managed to get my copy of the desired Firefox 3, but at a download rate between 5 and 20 Kb/sec, almost like when I was younger and I used a 56k modem. At least the nuisance was "worth" the wait, Firefox achieved the Guiness world record with over 8 milion downloads.

Down to the strict analysis of the software I must say the installation package (as it happened with the upgrade from 1.5 to 2.0) worked perfectly and it kept my bookmarked pages, my add-ons and even my tags intact, not a single change was made, which is great. It was also nice to have the Catalan verision of the software available from day one. I really like the default interface and I have grown accostumed to the new way tabs roll in a very short time. Navigation speed has improved as well, even though not as much in windows as it has in Linux.

But not everything is nice and I have already found several bugs. The first one is that, even though I have marked the option that warns you if you are going to close several tags from a browser window it never does. Firefox 2 worked fine with that.

One of the biggest drawbacks Firefox 2 had was the large ammounts of RAM memory it consumed, and it was announced that Firefox 3 would fix that problem. Well, it has to a certain extent, but has created a new one. I usually have between 50 and 70 tabs open at the same time, I don't like using bookmarks so I keep my favourite pages in tabs, not a good way to work but is how I do it. With so many tabs open it's ovious that the browser will have problems handling them, so Firefox 2 consummed around 400-600KB of RAM memory depending of the number and type of tags I had open. Well, Firefox 3 has decreased this ammount almost by half, now I get a RAM consumption of between 250-350KB of RAM, but I get as well 100% of CPU use. It had never happenened before to me, not even with the diabolical IE, so I'm quite upset about this fact. I cannot have Firefox turned on for a long time because if I do I may melt the CPU an wreck my computer plus it slows down the navigation speed. I hope Firefox fixes this issue as soon as possible, because this is not a new issue and I am not the only one who has this problem.