Browser Wars I

The Death of Firefox 3

I am so sick of Firefox. I’ve given it every chance to redeem itself. I’d shelved version two in favor of running IE 6 in three or 4 windows and having to shut them down every hour or two. But I installed V3 after falling for all the online hoopla about how much better it was at using memory and how it didn’t crash as much as two.

Jeez what a letdown! I probably didn’t help it any by installing every plugin under the sun but even after disabling or uninstalling them there was no getting around the fact that it hogged memory like nobody’s business. Every app I have had to wait in line while that pig took its time getting hung up in the dumbest ways possible. Switching tabs, loading sites with flash and active pages, it was the slowest thing I’d ever seen save Windows Live writer which I’m using to write this post.

Firefox really had a problem with Digsby, which I use to aggregate all my social networks and email accounts. For some reason these two got in each others way so much I had a hard time deciding which one should go. I raised the ceiling a little bit the other day by popping in 512 megs of RAM which helped but it still hung, just not as often.

The last straw came when I felt it seizing up on me the other day. I managed to open Task Manager and after about 5 minutes of watching the paint dry I saw that Firefox had consumed a whopping 300 megs of RAM and had my processor pinned at 100%! The hundred percent wasn’t new to me but seeing that pig gobble 300 megs of RAM while doing nothing just pissed me off.

So I yanked it. Without a bit of regret. But what to put in it’s place?

Next: Browser Wars II - Not as many choices as you think!