Firefox 3 and a half / arrrrgh

[davidnix71]

I'm still trying to get this set up. It's faster but the addons are a problem again. They added a 'feature' that deletes all your addon settings every time you close Firefox. It took me a while to figure out why things didn't stick. Cookie Monster seems to work backward from FF3. Before I would allow cookies and let CM block them unless I made an exception. Now I block them globally and make an exception.

I had to disable the addon compatiblilty check, because UnPlug doesn't have an official new release, but the old version does in fact work.

FF is still a ram and hd hog. I haven't been on that long and it's using 80mb ram and 350mb hd space.

I like the new user agent switcher. I can pretend to be an iPhone or web crawler and IE 6, 7 and 8 with a quick toggle.

[worker201]

I have an addon called Nightly Tester Tools that adds a convenient little button to the Add-Ons panel which says "Override All Compatibility".  Which is probably dangerous, but that's how I roll.  All my addons seem to be working.

My biggest complaint about the pre-release versions is that some builds crash a lot on Flickr.  If you download a testing release, it will update for you every time a new nightly build is available, which is basically every day.  About once per week they release a build that will crash after about 10 minutes on Flickr.  Must have something to do with the processing of dynamic content on Flickr, because after restarting, it occasionally has a hard time restoring your session.  But overall, it has been a good browser - I've been using it since the alpha days, and this is the only problem I have seen.

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.1pre) Gecko/20090702 Shiretoko/3.5.1pre

[Lead Head]

My FireFox install is using 25MB of harddrive space? How are you getting 350MB of HD useage? If you have been doing a lot of downloading, it may be storing them in some kind of temp folder. Unless I'm looking at the wrong FireFox folder..

The best feature I like so far of FF3.5, is the selectable tabs on restore. I've had it had it happen more then once where I've had a bunch of tabs open, then opened a site that crashed firefox, only to have it happen again when I restored the session. The ability to select which tabs I want to re-open is great.

[davidnix71]

No downloading. It's using the same virtual memory now, 358 MB, plus 83.5 MB ram

I have 2 GB ram and 1.5 GB of that is free, so it may be the way Tiger manages memory. I would rather see all my ram used. I paid extra for that.

TextEdit is using over 230 MB swap, the SystemUI Server , Preview, Little Snitch firewall, Growl, Finder, Dock and the Activity Monitor all use about the same. I have 4.6 GB swap open. I opened OpenOffice 2.4 and the swap went up to 5.6 GB.

Inspecting the process says Real memory 82MB (43.5 shared and 52.5 private), 350MB virtual, and 82.5 VPM. The cpu use floats from about 9% to 50% when opening a new blank window. 12 threads and 290 ports.

[Calum]

i wish there was a faster firefox. it's become what it should never have been, just another bloated buggy browser. I was using "swiftfox" for a while but now i use suse instead of debian (because suse's the only one that works properly with my video card) swiftfox is gone for me, as is proper audio support...

[Aloone_Jonez]

I think Firefox isn't too bad speed-wise.

When loading up it seems to be slow but once it's running it's not too bad.

I've only used Firefox since version 3, before that I used Opera because Firefox didn't have enough features. I only switched to Firefox because of the Adblock extension, if it wasn't for that, I'd still be using Opera.

[worker201]

I don't know if it's because of my version, but Firefox is extremely slow at recognizing keyboard input in the address bar.  It tries to anticipate what address you want, and this often leads to a delay between key presses and letters appearing.  Fortunately, I don't do that very often - I make extremely good use of bookmarks and search engine plugins.

[Calum]

for me it's very slow on sites such as facebook and myspace but not on other, less intensive, websites. It's probably because i am running suse 11.1 on an ancient (well, it is now) IBM M50, but to be honest i still think that if an IBM M50 was alright to surf the 'net with five years ago, it should still be just as good now.

[Lead Head]

Weird, my Firefox 3.5 is quite fast, no "lag" on key inputs either. This is on my Ubuntu rig as well.

[worker201]

for me it's very slow on sites such as facebook and myspace but not on other, less intensive, websites. It's probably because i am running suse 11.1 on an ancient (well, it is now) IBM M50, but to be honest i still think that if an IBM M50 was alright to surf the 'net with five years ago, it should still be just as good now.

Slightly off-topic - anybody know what language Facebook is built in?  AJAX is probably a little too crude for the volume they're getting.  Maybe some sort of Ruby?

[davidnix71]

It's a proprietary REST platform
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/API
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer
http://www.programmableweb.com/api/facebook