Breaking-Up With Firefox
After more than four years I am seriously considering dumping Firefox! Why… well, it’s gotten way too fat, and not the kind with the “PH”. It’s a CPU hog, consumes gluttonous amount of memory, and takes soooo long to start-up, (especially cold), even with plug-ins disabled. Honestly… I’m running a Quad Core Mac Pro with 4 gigs of ram and you’d think I was surfing on my grandma’s 486.
What’s frustrated me the most over the last six months is the incessant crashing. It seems I can’t run Firefox for more than 30 or 40 minutes without it crashing. This is super frustrating, especially if you’re editing CMS entries. I’m not sure what happened. I used to absolutely love FF… even got the T-Shirt. It was a breath of fresh, web browsing, air. Not so much as of late. I find myself grumbling at it daily.
Of course Firefox will always be my browser of choice for web development and debugging thanks to FireBug and the Web Developer Tool Bar, but what about the rest of the time? I have given Safari 3 and Opera a bit of a test drive and have been pretty impressed so far.
I am however, going to give FF one last chance to redeem itself. With the recent release of Firefox 3, the Mozilla team has some pretty tall claims…
Improved Performance: View Web pages faster, using less of your computer’s memory.
That sounds nice… maybe 4 gigs of memory is enough to browse the web. This is my favorite quote, right from the FF home page:
The Web is all about innovation, and Firefox 3 sets the pace with dozens of new features, including the smart location bar, one-click bookmarking and blindingly fast performance.
Blindingly fast performance. Well that would be a first for FF but only time will tell. Even if their claims are half true… it will be a welcomed improvement in performance. I’m gonna give FF3 a month or so evaluation before deciding if breaking-up is the right thing to do.