Many people around the Wide Wide World of Web have commented on how much faster Firefox 3 is than Firefox 2. What you may be interested in finding out is why it’s so much faster. And it’s not just because so many add-ons still have to be updated to be Firefox 3 compatible.
One of the devs writes
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, and you can see for yourself by getting a copy of the recently released Firefox 3 Beta 4.
While some of it may bemore tech speak than you may prefer, you should definitely check out Firefox 3 Memory Usage to find out why making Firefox 3 faster was such a hard task to complete.
