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Comment by rms | Hacker News Reader

I've been running the Firefox 3 alpha for a while now. It's gotten much more stable over the last couple weeks. I'm down to less than a crash a day now.

I find Firefox 2 to be almost unusable because rendering lots of complex Javascript and Flash eats up an enormous amount of memory. Firefox 3's rendering engine is much better; I'd recommend everyone try it and see if it works for them. There are some other nice new features, like URL auto completion suggesting your most commonly visited sites/directories first.

Use this tool to force your extensions to work with Firefox 3. http://www.oxymoronical.com/web/firefox/nightly

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I've almost stopped using Firefox several times because of the frequency of crashes in stable versions, so I think I'll wait a bit.

I agree. Stability in Firefox 2 is significantly worse than 1.x. I have to restart it at least once every couple of days, and frequently have to wait 20-30 seconds for random things to complete, during which it is completely unresponsive. If 3 beta is even slightly less stable (which would make sense) then I'll wait a while. Hopefully those issues will be resolved.

Firefox 2 being unstable is all the more reason to try Firefox 3! A lot of the instability comes from the Firefox 2 rendering engine breaking down when you have Gmail and Google Docs and Meebo and 12 Youtube videos open at once. Firefox 3 is using 230 megs of RAM for me right now. If I was running Firefox 2 with the same tabs it would be moving at a crawl and using 750 megs of RAM.

The bug I notice the most is text entry/dropdown boxes sometimes not working correctly, this happens most often in a really poorly programmed game I play, http://www.hyperiums.com.

How well does that extension work? Can I get web dev and firebug working with it?

It works fine, it'll get all of your extensions working. Firefox 3 didn't seem to break extension compatibility so it's mostly just changing the flag that won't let them run.

Of course, some of them may cause crashes, but Firebug seems to work without a problem. I'm not running web dev, should I be running it?

Thanks! I'll back up my FF folder and give 3 a try.

Yes, WebDev extension is awesome! http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/

Firefox 3 doesn't overwrite Firefox 2. You can choose to run either Firefox 2 or 3, it just won't let you run both at the same time.

Are you saying it uses a different profile?

Thanks for bringing this up. I am now using FF3 and it seems faster, lighter and the Gecko engine re-build makes the rendering a lot cleaner. Even the fonts seem cleaner, that maybe the default CSS file though.

Cons: The bookmark piece needs some polishing, especially in the 'Organize Bookmarks' window.

Does the new rendering code decrease the instances of bug 263160?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=263160

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