stupendous.net

I’ve been tracking the Minefield build of Firefox 3 for the past few months. As each beta would come out, I’d download it, try it for a few days and then go back to Safari. Main reasons?

• The native controls work wasn’t finished, and it looked like a frankenstein monster. (Not that I have anything against the Monster, he actually had a heart of gold, and it’s a bit of a stereotype, but there you go.)
• It was buggy/slow/crashed a lot.
• It chewed up too much memory.
• It was ugly. Yeah ok, repeat of the first one, but you know. Now look at it:

Not only does it LOOK good, but it also works like a native app now; controls are snappy, they work just like normal aqua controls (because they are?) and all of the performance issues are pretty much gone. The whole browser used to block when clicking on a new link that took a while to respond, now its under a second and you can be doing stuff while it loads pages in the background. Yeah I know, not groundbreaking, but it was annoying that this bug has persisted in FF2 for so long.

Digg pages still never complete though, not sure what that is from, it doesn’t do it on any other browser, but I’ll blame Digg for now because usually it’s their fault, right? :)

Memory wise, it is still a bit of a hog. I’ve only been running it for the past hour or so and its already at 320MB. Thats 10% of my ram, guys. I know you’ve been working on that but it still needs work. Just linking in a new malloc() library isn’t enough here, methinks.

So the 2 remaining things for me is:

• Memory usage
• Digg never finishes loading

As it is I think I’ll be switching to beta 4 as my primary browser on my mac from now on.