All or most of us are happy with the release of the new Firefox 3, we have waited a lot of time for it seeing beta after beta. But since the last week we have it available. Don’t you have downloaded yet?

It was well known the problems that Firefox 2 had with memory management because it took too much memory of the computer system. Now everyone talks about how faster is FF3 than FF2 and the 15k fixed issues and improvements it has. This is good but I bet you something that nobody has done this little test I’m going to show you.

For this simple test I had the involuntary help of some of the English blogs I’m reading lately:

• Affiliate Confession: Alan LeStourgeon and his confessions as an affiliate marketer.
• Binary Ant: do you know this site? It is great, why don’t you subscribe to the feed?
• John Chow: what can I say about this guy? He lives in Canada, earns $30K/month by blogging…
• KushMoney: a very hard worker blogger, an online young entrepreneur.
• Shoemoney: another dot com mogul and online entrepreneur.
• The Make Money Online: the blog of Paul B, a professional full time blogger.

I read a lot of blogs too, I just picked these ones. Ok, lets see the memory load of FF2 first with any page and below with these blogs opened:

Now let’s do the same with FF3

Leaving apart CPU values we see that FF3 alone takes 28′8% more memory space than FF2. If FF3 is faster I don’t know but if it is true surely is because it loads in memory more elements than FF2.

With the 6 blogs opened FF3 takes 6% less memory space than FF2 and if we take in count that the empty FF3 takes more memory we can deduce that the memory taken to manage each tab is less than with the previous version.

Conclusions:

First of all this little review is only about memory management, the issue I’m more worried about because I tend to open lots of tabs and it is really true I can notice how the performance gets down as I open more and more tabs.

Does FF3 improve the memory management? Yes it does, but not at the level I expected. I got only a 6% of memory saving with 6 tabs. It seems that the more tabs you open the more memory saving. I could have checked this point with 12 or 15 tabs but … well I have many other important things to do and little time.

Finally, FF3 still has a poor memory management but however is one of the best, for me the best, web browsers. Surely the next version improves this issue.

By the way, want to know which really sweet gift Mozilla staff received from the competition?

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