Firefox 3 Beta 1
I use firefox as my primary browser so I am naturally fairly interested in the development of firefox 3. I have installed a few of the alpha releases but now the firefox 3 beta has been released for download. There is a feature list on the mozilla website so I don’t really see the point in elaborating on that since theirs will be more complete.
The thing that I probably find most annoying about firefox currently is how the ram usage slowly creeps up, my PC is about 6 years old now and has 768mb of ram installed (I upgraded). This means speed is a fairly big issue currently. The beta seems to run pretty quickly and I was pleased to see the ram usage kept pretty low. There is a test page that I use which has a lot of css on it and that quickly moved the ram usage for about 50 - 120. When I then closed the tab I noticed that it only took a few seconds before the ram usage had dropped right down to the original.
There seems to be a bit of a bug with the canvas object because when I tried running my physics engine it messed up drawing the circles. Just squares were fine, and I am sure it was the drawing part that was going wrong because when I just changed the code that just drew the shape so it drew a square instead it worked fine. I submitted this to bugzilla and discovered that it was a fault in my code due to the canvas code that draws and fills the circle in firefox 3 being implemented slightly differently to firefox 2. It turned out that my code never finished drawing the arc (a 360 degree arc made the circle) so it ended up trying to draw hundreds of the arcs each frame which was why it got intolerably slow. The bug is now fixed.
Also firefox didn’t like being closed. It put my cpu at 100% for about one and a half minutes before the process actually ended. Hopefully this will get fixed since it is only beta 1.
Some of the features do look quite nice. I especially like the feature to pause downloads and then resume them even after you have closed the browser. Also the upgraded plugin manager is nice.
The best way to find out about it is to go and download the beta now and try it yourself.