Firefox 3 today!

[Mark Itzero]

firefox 3 comes out at 10AM today! - http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2008/06/17 ... y-is-here/

[scott]

It's definitely worth the upgrade. I've been using the FF3 Betas and Release Candidates for a couple months now and this new version has a number of improvements. Most notably the memory management has been overhauled and is much better when you have lots of tabs/windows open for long periods of time.

Here is an in-depth article from a Firefox developer about how they improved the memory management:

http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firef ... ory-usage/

From the article:

For the results below we loaded 29 different web pages through 30 windows over 11 cycles (319 total page loads), always opening a new window for each page load (closing the oldest window alive once we hit 30 windows). At the end we close all the windows but one and let the browser sit for a few minutes so see if they will reclaim memory, clear short-term caches, etc. There is a 3 second delay between page loads to try and get all the browsers to take the same amount of time. We used the proxy server that is part of Standalone Talos to make sure we were serving up the same content. We had to disable popup blocking to allow the test window to open the 30 windows for running the test. You can get the simple webpage test here and the python script to monitor memory usage here. These things are built on top of the standalone talos framework so you’ll need to drop the python script in with talos to get good results. Mad props to Mike Schroepfer for getting this all working.

Results



Looking at the graph:

* All browsers increase in memory use slightly over time, but the Firefox 3 slope is closer to 0.
* The _peak_ of Firefox 3 is lower than the terminal size of Firefox 2!
* The terminal state of Firefox 3 is nearly 140MB smaller than Firefox 2. 60% less memory!
* IE7 doesn’t appear to give any memory back, even after all the windows are closed!
* Firefox 3 ends up about 400mb smaller than IE7 at the end of the test!

[Mark Itzero]

Here's your download link: http://www.getfirefox.com/