Not so much new features with Fx 3.0a2

With the release of Firefox 3.0a2/Gecko 1.9a2 earlier this week, there has been a common question, “So what new features come with this milestone? ” The short answer: not much. The long answer is best summed up by Percy from Mozilla Links:

“The Mozilla project has released the second alpha of Gran Paradiso. Like Alpha 1 it is not much about Firefox but a testing vehicle for a large number of changes to the underlying Gecko rendering engine.

Some important changes have occurred that affect the rendering of partially downloaded content (XML and web pages as well) and the calculation of particular dimensions and positions of web pages elements. Enhanced support for Mac widgets and the new Cairo rendering engine is included as well.”

One feature you still will not find in the latest Firefox 3 milestone is Places. So far I have not heard anything official as to when we should expect to see Places, but it is suppose to be part of Firefox 3. Of course the same was said with Firefox 2, so we shall wait and see what happens.

News Source: Mozilla Links

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Tabs or Windows?

Over on Go Firefox!, an interesting question was posted: Which uses less system resources (memory)?

My theory is using tabs would use less resources then having the same sites opened in separate windows. My reasoning is each window has to load the entire browser interface, not just the page content. So, I did a little experiment. First using Firefox 2.0.0.1 with a clean profile (no extensions, no plug-ins and default theme) and imported my bookmarks from another profile.

For the first test, I opened Firefox with the clean profile and choose 5 sites and opened each one in its own window:

Next, I closed then opened Firefox with the clean profile and choose the same 5 sites and this time, opened each one in its own tab:

As you can see from the two experiments, having the same sites loaded in tabs used 25 MB less memory. Okay, so 30 MB may not be all that much, but remember this was with a clean profile. There are no extensions load and I was using the default theme.

Okay, so how about something a little more typical? This time I have used my default profile which still uses the default Firefox theme but with 32 extensions. I tested with 7 tabs open (6 with pages loaded and 1 blank). Then tested the same 7 pages each in there own windows. Here are the results using a normal (with extensions and plug-ins) profile with 7 pages (1 blank) in 7 Windows:

The same profile with the 7 pages in 7 Tabs:

Even with a more typical usage (profile with extensions and plug-ins) Firefox is still using more memory (30 MB) displaying the pages in their own window instead of in tabs on one window. But even an extra 30 MB is not all that bad for memory usage. It really comes down to personal preference, but I the big “selling feature” of Firefox was the tabbed browsing.

Edit: While totally unintentional, it was interesting to see that on 3 out the 4 test Flock which was sitting idle with 4 open tabs was using more resources than was Firefox. This version of Flock is based of Firefox 1.5, which as many will recall was heavily plagued by memory leaks.

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