I'm Just Sharing

Firefox is my favorite browser, as I mentioned in my post about Error Doctor. Now it’s in testing for the next release, Firefox 3, and I can hardly wait.

The main improvement that I’m looking for is how it handles memory. For all its good qualities, it uses a lot of RAM, which, when you’re doing as many things as I tend to do at once, really starts slowing down other things. I’ll admit that I’m not quite sure how virtual memory works, but Firefox can eat it up the longer you have the browser running. It got so bad for me that I had to turn off pre-caching of sites just to free up some of that memory.

So, just that one feature would be enough for me. But there are a few more things coming that I like. There will be more security against bad sites, those sites that will drop malware and other nasty things on a flyby. You’ll also be able to close your browser and have open right back up to everything you just closed out if you wish; I love that idea, because I’ve often had to shut it down for some reason or another, and forgot to bookmark some pages I’d wanted to read. Something else it will do that I don’t have an issue with but others do is that if you have to close the browser in the middle of a download, it will pick that download back up when it’s opened again; that’s actually pretty great.

Of course, I won’t be happy if all the extensions I presently use won’t work with it, but I hear most of the developers are scrambling to get them all working, and that would be a good thing. Oh yeah, it’s supposed to be faster than Firefox 2, and no one ever complains about more speed, do they?

So yeah, I’m ready for Firefox 3. I will not be a tester, though, so anyone else who’d like to do it can, as the beta is available already. I hope you have a good experience with it; I’ll wait until the real thing is ready.