Practical Technology

I’ve loved Firefox since version 0.93. It was so much better than Internet Explorer and the other alternatives that I couldn’t imagine using anything else. But, then Firefox’s memory leaks went from annoying me to ticking me off; I started having real stability problems with it on both Windows and Linux; and security holes started appearing far more often. I was about to switch to Safari on Windows and MacOS and Konqueror on Linux, when Mozilla got serious about not just fixing, but rebuilding Firefox. Now, Firefox 3 release candidate 1 was released early. Based on my quick look at it, I may end up sticking with Firefox after all.

I downloaded Firefox 3 RC 1 yesterday for both my Windows XP SP3 system and one of my openSUSE 10.3 PCs. Both are up-to-day systems without any problems. Installing the browser on both operating systems was a snap. How easy was it? I installed them at the same time with barely a thought.

Once in place, rather than looking at the new and nifty features, I just start using the browser as I would normally. Features are all well and good but what I really wanted to know was whether the browser was back to being a stable, reliable partner and had it stopped snatching up memory. I’m happy to report that, based on twelve hours of non-stop use and abuse, Firefox 3 is both more stable than Firefox 2.x and it finally has stopped being a memory piggy.

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