I noticed that the Beta 1 for Firefox 3.0 was made available sometime yesterday. I"ve been curious as to whether the Firefox dev team would do a serious revamp for this release or just concentrate on bug fixes and performance improvements. Early indications seem to suggest that it is indeed a major revamp of both the core and the UI, and that Firefox will be a much better browser for it.
I"m not a big Firefox user because I find the memory management to be very poor most of the time and the spiraling memory consumption affects both Firefox"s performance and the overall performance of my systems. I like Firefox but Firefox just doesn"t like me, so, while I have it installed on most systems, I mostly use Internet Explorer 7 and Opera for day to day browsing. Every time I say this I"m faced by a chorus of users telling me that there"s no problem with the way that Firefox handles memory, but this isn"t what I"m seeing. When a browser starts to edge near to consuming 500MB of RAM on a regular basis, something is wrong. Sure, I hammer the browser and have dozens of pages open at a time, but since both IE and Opera can handle this load, I expect Firefox to do so too. So far, it can"t, and because of that the icon doesn"t get clicked on that often.