FF2 vs FF3

RESmonkey

Diamond Member
May 6, 2007
4,818
2
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1.6 Ghz P4
512MB ram
Windows XP
Radeon 9600 (pro i think).


Should I stick w/ FF2? I keep a lot of tabs open, have Photoshop running in the background, and other junk running as well.
 

Quiksilver

Diamond Member
Jul 3, 2005
4,725
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71
I think it's about the same when it comes to resources maybe a little less. Just ff3 uses those resources more efficiently(eg. snappier).
 

nordloewelabs

Senior member
Mar 18, 2005
542
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i'm not sure about memory footprint, but FF3 does
feel snappier to me. i have it installed on 3 machines:

P3 700Mhz 640Mb SDRAM
Celeron 900Mhz 1.2Gb DDR
Athlon XP 3000+ 1.5Gb DDR

the snappiness is noticeable in all 3 machines, but
more so on the Athlon. FF2 did feel less responsive
than FF3 in all machines. it's been a great upgrade
to me so far.
 

MrScott81

Golden Member
Aug 31, 2001
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there is no way it has a SMALLER memory footprint. FF3 uses memory like crazy...though it does seem to be a little faster.
 

fleabag

Banned
Oct 1, 2007
2,450
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I skipped FF2 and went straight to FF3 and found it was it satisfactory on a PIII 700mhz 512MB.
 

0roo0roo

No Lifer
Sep 21, 2002
64,795
84
91
it does have a smaller foot print.
its just not that significant.
its the speedup that matters more.
having ~100 tabs it uses 50-100mb less than ff2 i find
 

noriseghir

Member
Jul 4, 2008
27
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0
For my self, and may be i'm an exception, i felt more cpu ressources usage with FF3 than whith FF2 on old hardware (maybe because of sites optimisations for FF2?)
for my PIII 1Ghz i swithched to Opera 9.5 as it is more responsive and less CPU hungry for this config.
for configs with P4 3 Ghz and above i dont feel any defference between modern browsers (except IE7) and my CPU usage is always very low, so i use FF3 (Because i like it :))
 

nordloewelabs

Senior member
Mar 18, 2005
542
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Originally posted by: noriseghir
For my self, and may be i'm an exception, i felt more cpu ressources usage with FF3 than whith FF2 on old hardware (maybe because of sites optimisations for FF2?)

maybe you had some misconfiguration and/or extension that caused your FF3 to become less responsive. in such the case, the best solution is a full uninstall with the manual deletion of FF's install folder and also the user's profile folder.

even on my PuppyLinux, FF3 feels snappier than FF2 and FF is well known to be slower under Linux.

 

pontifex

Lifer
Dec 5, 2000
43,804
46
91
Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
it does have a smaller foot print.
its just not that significant.
its the speedup that matters more.
having ~100 tabs it uses 50-100mb less than ff2 i find

who the hell uses 100 tabs?


my ff3 used 118 mb ram the other night and i had at max 3 tabs open.
 

MrScott81

Golden Member
Aug 31, 2001
1,891
0
76
Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
it does have a smaller foot print.
its just not that significant.
its the speedup that matters more.
having ~100 tabs it uses 50-100mb less than ff2 i find

What about using less than 10 tabs? I found that just one tab has a memory footprint of 45MB (i have a few addons).

Using FF2 (with the same addons) the memory usage was only around 20MB.
 

Fox5

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2005
5,957
7
81
Originally posted by: Quiksilver
I think it's about the same when it comes to resources maybe a little less. Just ff3 uses those resources more efficiently(eg. snappier).

Firefox 3 uses the native window manager (ie, windows') instead of coming with its own.