my FF3.0.13 uses (with 30tabs and always online) like 1GB

I currently have 2 tabs open and I’m only seeing 55MB. Firefox was much worse in the past with managing memory when it comes to additional tabs. They’ve gotten a lot better at allocating and dumping memory since the firefox 2 days.

You might look into trashing all of the useless addons that you have, which by the way, slow the browser down substantially. Try running FF in safe-mode to see the difference.

Page rendering speed is the same in IE8 and FF3.5.

Chrome, actually, feels much faster than either IE8 or Firefox, but i’ve never bothered to switch.

Alan, thanks.

Lukas, tabs in IE and Firefox open exactly the same way on my machine. Do you use IE8?

Jared, “echo chamber”, that was the word I was looking for.

Daniel, I use also Gmail and Google Reader. It is all the same, regardless which browser I use. I also tried some of the Google apps.

Andrew, did you ever try to search for bookmarks in the sidebar? I like it better.

moiecoute, perhaps it is just that behaving like teenagers makes us that the old punk rock times come back.

Sebastian, I also use Firefox only because of the plugins. In my view, that is the only significant difference to IE.

Ruud, the site you linked to works fine in Firefox 3.5 on my computer.

Simplify PC Solutions, telepathy was always my strength.

Rohit, perhaps these sites are “optimized” for IE. Try IE tab.

Jay, Chrome has a smaller footprint but less features.

Firefox, 144MB
Chrome, 29MB

That’s a big, big difference.

In other words, Firefox 3.5 seems just as fast as 3.0, and Internet Explorer 8 seems just as fast as both.

While performance does have increased on some java script/AJAX heavy sites for me (e.g DeviantART), it still performs like FF 3.0 on most other sites. I also can’t say that the affected sites load faster – saying they load smoother with less hickups or getting stuck seems more correct.

FF is still way behind in terms of speed when compared to the Webkit based browsers. Using Chrome/Iron, the performance increases while rendering sites are actually a lot more noticable than they are with FF 3.5, but those browser have problems of their own (still not rendering a lot of sites correctly for example).

Still FF is a good browser and my browser of choice, but not because of the functionality it provides out of the box. It’s more that the extensions I use can’t be found in other browsers. IMHO Mozilla should deliver with the next major version so they deserve all the hype again.

No you are not the only one to not notice the speed improvement.

Anyone who writes reviews whilst trying to sound like an exited teenager should star in a remake of the song ‘Pretty fly for a white guy’.

Firefox 3.5 did NOT change my life, but I did notice that it was better.

The awesome bar searching my bookmarks DOES rock. My bookmarks file is pretty big and some sites or pages defy categorization, and recording and searching for tags is extra effort and wasted steps. Just typing in a snippet into the awesome bar is a Good Thing(tm).

The DNS prefetching adds a little when I’m surfing but for the most part I stay on one site for a while so the gain isn’t consistent. It’s most noticeable when ads are not being blocked, or when the network isn’t using fast resolvers (i.e. NOT using OpenDNS).

The faster Javascript processing makes a huge difference on SharePoint sites compared to IE7, but IE8 also gained on IE7 (and came out before Firefox 3.5).

The Javascript boost also shows, I think, in the bookmarks manipulation which used to be sluggardly on my worst machine. Now the bookmarks performance is fine on that worst machine.

Bookmarks also got an update in drag and drop editing; the flyout no longer closes when any change is made. But IE7 had that first.

I keep a dozen to two dozen tabs open all the time… and the Firefox 3.5 memory consumption has dropped. It’s mostly around 200 MB now but used to rise to over 400 MB.

As Lukas noted, the IE8 tabs are nice, but there’s still a lag when trying to open a new one and actually use it. Tabs have always been fast with FF and I use Tab-Mix-Plus to make the tabs a little nicer.

I notice an equal delay with Chrome, Firefox and IE when I go to a noisy site like CNN.com, in my subjective opinion, Firefox is the best, then Chrome, then IE8.

Granted, some of those topics may be true, but the reviews, praise, or disgust is often not objective or unbiased. It’s helped me weed out which feeds I pay attention to at least. Sad to say, there’s not too many feeds that are objective and unbiased.

Since then, i’ve been running nightly builds, upgraded every other week. I’ve never seen or felt any speed improvements.

However, i’ve always felt that IE was decidedly more sluggish than Firefox, though any benchmark i mixed up felt within similar margins of error.

But there is some interesting behaviour that’s different between IE and Firefox:

Firefox CTRL-T, long running instance. Tab opens immediately.

IE CTRL-T, long running instance. Tab opens immediately, but it takes a few milliseconds until the new tab is actually marked active.

The latter does actually not change anything, as i can start typing the URL right after pressing CTRL-T and works just as well.

But it’s about the impression it leaves to me, not the facts.

Doesn’t matter. IE is still awful by comparison. I have no desire to go back.