Having used it, watched it crash, hog memory, stall, screw up rendering, … I have to wonder exactly what the Mozilla corporation is thinking by releasing this stinking pile of bits. My laptop is a dual core Intel machine with 2.5 GB ram, and a fast 7200 RPM SATA drive. And it is brought to its knees by firefox 3.0. A third of ram gets snarfed by it immediately upon running. User load increases to 1 during anything stressful. Like loading Drudgereport. Javascript? Yeah, it can, and does bring the browser to a grinding halt, driving user load and memory consumption through the roof. Don’t believe me? Have a look.
`landman@lightning:~$ top
top - 11:22:31 up 15:57, 5 users, load average: 0.81, 0.91, 0.81
Tasks: 191 total, 2 running, 189 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu0 : 14.6%us, 2.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 81.6%id, 0.0%wa, 1.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu1 : 21.1%us, 3.5%sy, 0.0%ni, 75.4%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2571704k total, 2552028k used, 19676k free, 16004k buffers
Swap: 995988k total, 7748k used, 988240k free, 262708k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
16975 landman 20 0 2021m 1.3g 36m R 19 53.4 11:51.32 firefox
6363 root 20 0 302m 117m 21m S 11 4.7 52:05.96 Xorg
22044 landman 20 0 288m 88m 19m S 10 3.5 0:12.32 opera
`
Yes, indeed, that is 1.3 GB of RESIDENT memory that firefox has grabbed. Yes. All I am doing is reading news sites (Drudge, Fox, Freep, and a few others). Firefox-2 was good in comparison. No, really. It was. Notice the Opera line in there. I am typing this in an Opera window, because Firefox keeps greying out at every keypress. I can’t wait for Chrome. Opera works well, is fast, so I might just switch. Firefox has become bloatware. We try to actively discourage use of IE due to its numerous security … er … issues. Vista doesn’t work reliably on our corpoate network. I assumed this was the case as Vista was bloatware and not a serious OS. But Firefox? Same browser, many different OSes. Same results on all OSes. Must be something else. Google, please get Chrome out for Linux sooner than later. Please?