Firefox 3 Beta 2 on Leopard: First impressions
Took the spanking new Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 2 for a spin today on Leopard and I have to say it is quite to close to what most have been saying, that even as a beta the product is much better than what Firefox 2 is at today. The new UI tweaks and the native widgets apart, what is instantly noticeable is the rendering, which now having switched to Cairo, is very close to what web pages look like in Safari.
On the memory consumption front too the new version is a marked improvement, staying well under 100 MB of RAM, even with a couple of tabs open. Even CPU utilization has been markedly reduced (245 MB RAM and 24% CPU usage with Bon Echo 2.0.0.12 pre), though I have to admit this was pretty much a virgin install with no extensions involved in it.
Lastly, Flash continues to be a real pain for Firefox. Even on optimized SWFs, which has been compiled to play at 15 frames per second, the CPU utilization shoots up like a fountain. Since I cannot use any of my existing extensions, I am going to give using this version a miss till at least a couple of key extensions support it.
