Pulling no punches: Firefox 3.x sucks

By joe

January 24, 2009 - 2 minutes read - 367 words

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?