Firefox 3

**Ciderhelm** · #1 04-24-2008, 09:07 PM

...is the most awful browser I have ever, ever used. Performance is by far worse than even IE6. I cannot comprehend what led them to the decision to rebuild from scratch using an awful engine.

Only writing this because I accidentally installed the beta again before opening my browser, and I'm just as pissed off about it as I was before.

**Alent** · #2 04-24-2008, 09:14 PM

Your post reminds me of netscape 4, preview release 4. It introduced ~THE~ bug that killed Netscape imo.

**Hypatia** · #3 04-25-2008, 07:56 AM

Which beta are you using? (I ask because accidentally installing sounds like you might have an old installer lying around?)

I've been running 3.0 betas for some time, and while the first couple were more than sluggish, 3.0b5 is definitely just fine.

**Velhym** · #4 04-25-2008, 08:29 AM

Are they rebuilding Firefox completely with every version they use? O_o

Nuberino · #5 04-25-2008, 08:32 AM

I hope it is revolutionary, otherwise I cringe at the thought of learning the minor intricacies of yet another browser engine.

**Hypatia** · #6 04-25-2008, 11:10 AM

As far as I can see, it's pretty much the same in behavior (i.e. CSS quirks or what-have-you) as previous firefoxes.

There were two places where I noticed real slowness early on—the first was with the location bar auto-completion, which uses the new "places" stuff (backed by sqlite). This has gotten much much faster, and now that I've gotten used to the different behavior, it works really really well.

The other thing was that rendering was slow. Like *dog* slow. I think it was around 3.0b3 where they did some intense tuning, however, and now it is at least as fast as anything else I've seen. I could imagine that performance is different on Windows (although I think that unifying the rendering engines between platforms was part of what they were aiming to do with the new system?)

Anyway, it all seems good to me at this point in time.

**Ciderhelm** · #7 04-25-2008, 11:14 AM

It's much slower at handling transparent PNG files, multiple layers of fixed CSS backgrounds, and anything that IE7/IE7 and FF2 currently do that requires processor-intensive work. This is in Beta 5, particularly when scrolling.

It still has a much larger memory footprint than IE7, just like FF2.

**Ciderhelm** · #8 04-25-2008, 11:17 AM

Actually I take that back, it's only running a slightly larger memory footprint than IE7. That's a plus.

**kittikat** · #9 04-25-2008, 01:26 PM

The Marmot's Back!!!! Yay!!!!!

**Velhym** · #10 04-25-2008, 02:33 PM

It was back yesterday. >_>