Performance of firefox with older releases haven’t been awesome. Couple of addons can easily take over 100megs of ram and browser become easily very unstable and slow. I did update on my macbook (PowerPC G4, 1.6 GHz single core CPU, 1.5G DDR2 ram MaxOS 10.4.11)

New firefox has also new logo

Before update with 3.0 I had 7 addons installed. With 2-3 tabs open firefox used 250megs of ram and cpu was 30-40. When my firefox was on heavy usage, it taked over 1500megs of ram and 100% of cpu… After update to 3.5 memory usage dropped to 90-100megs. Cpu dropped to 10-15%.

Then I installed 26 addons and opened 47 tabs (2 youtube videos and one <video>-tag, lots of heavy js/css sites.) Memory usage was just 226megs and cpu usage was at 50%. Firefox was little slow, but usable! It didn’t even try to freeze. After the test I closed all tabs expect one and memory usage dropped to 148megs and cpu usage is back at 10-15%!

Quick list:

• Using many (over 15) addons won’t kill firefox instantly
• Opening many tabs(over 20) won’t freeze kill firefox anymore
• Memory usage have dropped 300%-500%
• CPU usage is almost always under 50% on normal usage its under 20%
• Acid3 test gives 92/100 points (ie8 gets about 20)
• Firefox is my primary browser again

Biggest problem for me with firefox was the CPU/MEM usage while using lots of addons and now its fixed. I can install every cool addon I want and still use firefox without killing it! Now I just want that they fix the nvidia/linux canvas tag bug…