by Ron Schenone November 20, 2007 Comments

As most of you know, I am an avid Firefox user and have been for at least 4 years. For the most part, I personally find Firefox easy to use, and even with the high memory usage, have stuck with it. So today when I downloaded Firefox 3 Beta 1, I was hoping that this problem would be a thing of the past. What happened next was totally unbelievable.

After I installed Firefox 3 Beta 1 I fired it up for a test spin. I opened 4 tabs, which I usually do during the day and is part of my normal routine. After about 5 minutes or so, my hard disk light was going bonkers. My system started to slow down and became unresponsive. I was finally able to open task manager and noticed that Firefox was using a whopping 791,840k and was still climbing.

After almost 10 minutes of trying, I finally was able to reboot my computer. I tried Firefox 3 Beta 1 again, and at first I thought all was well. This lasted for about 5 minutes and again, memory shot up over 800,000k. I did this 4 times and each time it was the same. After an hour I finally just uninstalled the beta.

I filed a report with the Mozilla team. It was difficult not saying something nasty.

This behavior is totally beyond belief. The issue of high memory usage has been noted by many users. Yet it seems that this one issue is still being totally ignored or not fixable. I don’t care how many new features Firefox 3 has, if the memory issue is not resolved, the browser is totally useless.

Heh Mozilla people. Please take a serious look at this problem. It really does need to be fixed.

Has anyone else tried the beta? What was your experience?

Comments welcome.

[tags]firefox 3 beta 1, mozilla, memory, usage, high, unbelievable, [/tags]