"While Firefox 2 used less memory than it's predecessor, Firefox 1.5, we intentionally restricted the number of changes to the Gecko platform (Gecko 1.8.1 was only slightly different than Gecko 1.8) on which Firefox was built. However, while the majority of people were working on Firefox 2/Gecko 1.8.1, others of us were already ripping into the platform that Firefox 3 was to be built on: Gecko 1.9. We've made more significant changes to the platform than I can count, including many to reduce our memory footprint. The result has been dramatic."
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Member since:2006-02-28
Firefox philosophy is plugin based, so i don't expect (and want?) adblock and other 'advanced' stuff (not so many people use ad blocking) to be builtin.
Camino does not support plugins, so having adblocking out of the box is mandatory.
Quality of this beta4 is so great that i don't think Camino will survive a long time. I was expecting (announced) improvements for the mac port, but firefox 2 was so bad that i am really impressed with this beta.
Member since:2007-06-22
Well, Firefox' integration with Mac OS X is still not as tight as Camino's. For instance, Firefox 3 still does not support the system keychain or systemwide proxy settings (2 things I use on a daily basis). I'm especially disappointed in the former since it has been pointed out to me that the infrastructure for keychain support was implemented over half a year ago and it was allegedly "little work" to actually make it work but obviously it didn't land in time for the beta cycle or was regarded as a low priority target. On Windows such details might seem superfluous but on desktops with better frameworks (including GNOME/KDE) this makes Firefox stand out a bit.
But I have to admit that I fell in love with the new Mac theme. Although it shares some similarities with the Windows theme the grey colours suit me far more than the coloured glass buttons on the Windows platform.
Smooth scrolling is too slow on my old Intel Macbook to be usable (compared to Safari at least).
Auto-completion in the address bar is more informative and clearer now but I have experienced some problems with it becoming jerky if you start to delete an address character by character (via backspace) as Firefox will try to find a match in the history each time.
Anyway, I feel rather positive about the new Firefox. Oh, and to add at least *something* which is on-topic: I'm glad that Mozilla has been working on the memory consumption. I'm curious how it will compare with Opera 9.5.
Member since:
2005-11-12
I've just tried Beta 4 in Leopard and and it's alot smoother, smooth scrolling is really smooth. It's much better than 2.x and the theme fits nice.
It's a straight fight between this and Camino for me at the moment, Firefox is still slower on startup and lacks a default ad-block like Camino but great work with beta4.