Firefox 3 as it Pertains to the Typical Web Developer
Well, I have finally made the jump to the new Firefox 3 browser. After using Firefox 2.0.0.8 for such a long time, I felt it was time to get the new one to see what all the hype was about.
It looks like Windows Vista a little bit, I still do not know whether this is good or bad, but I do not have a problem with it thus far. Although some add-ons have yet to be updated to work, most of the popular ones are now 100% compatible.
First off, the characteristic memory leak in FF2 is not altogether gone, but its impact on system performance is markedly lower now than it has ever been, even without tweaking the values found in about:config. I had roughly 12 tabs open in one window and Firefox 3 managed to stay under 100k physical and under 70k virtual memory, running on Windows XP Pro w/ SP2. Results may vary, but if you are a tab-junkie like me, and you constant keep FF running with 12 or so tabs for days on end, you will probably see it bloat to over 100K in both physical and virtual memory, but it takes much longer now – and if you minimize Firefox it will actually release more memory now, provided you do not have a bunch of active java or flash gumming up the works.
Ok, now on to a web developer point-of-view. With a few add-ons (Rankquest SEO toolbar, SEOQuake, Web Dev Tools, user agent switcher, colorzilla, measureit, firebug, google pagerank, IE Tab, linkchecker, and ShowIP) you can easily do 90% of your web debugging and testing in this browser. I have not seen a change in the way Firefox renders CSS or javascript in this new iteration, although I may not be looking hard enough yet.