Firefox 3 Beta 4 Arrives

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I’ve been using an early version of Firefox 3 Beta 4 for a few days (Beta 3 before that)… And while it seems like we’re making progress, I’d suggest waiting for a release candidate – unless you’re a developer or enjoy living on the bleeding edge (like me) and are prepared for the numerous crashes that come with the territory. In addition to under-the-hood tweaks and a SQLite database, the interface is being refreshed. So far, the Windows version is looking better than the Mac one. In fact, the non-graceful button aliasing is an eyesore that I’ve dumped in favor of GrApple Delicious. Speaking of living on the edge, I’ve also been playing with the Internet Explorer 8 Beta under XP – with its fair share of errors, too. (The IE7 compatibility mode is a nice feature, since you can’t install and run IE7 and IE8 concurrently.)

4 thoughts on “Firefox 3 Beta 4 Arrives”

  1. The nice thing about FF 3 is that it uses way less memory than FF2.

    I share our powerbook G4 with my wife. We are always both logged in. With FF3 the laptop does not run as hard and uses less memory.

    I’ll also get nightly builds of firefox from http://firefoxmac.furbism.com if the last one i got was rather unstable.

  2. Yah, I’m counting on that improved memory handling as I often have a dozen or more tabs open simultaneously and it can seriously slow my Mac (and frequently requires me to force quit FF2 when it gets hung up). I also like how the new version asks to save all my tabs prior to quitting – in the past, I bookmark-all-tabs and name it as the date (i.e. 031108a).

  3. i put ff3b4 on my macbook today. its noticeably snappier, and once its nice and polished im sure the people who preferred safari because of its launch time will switch over.

  4. Change Firefox Memory Cache

    By default, Firefox does not use a fixed size memory cache – it uses a percentage of system memory. Setting a fixed size memory cache can often reduce memory usage – 4 or 8MB is sufficient in most instances.

    1. In your Firefox address bar, enter the following text: about:config

    2. Scroll down to the entry titled browser.cache.memory.enable and make sure the Value is set to true. If it’s not, double-click anywhere in the browser.cache.memory.enable line and the status will change to True

    http://www.helpero.com/images/howto/howto_4_3.jpg

    3. Right-click (Apple users ctrl-click) anywhere in the about:config window and select New and then Integer from the pop-up menu

    http://www.helpero.com/images/howto/howto_4_4.jpg

    4. Enter browser.cache.memory.capacity in the New integer value pop-up box

    http://www.helpero.com/images/howto/howto_4_5.jpg

    5. You’ll need to enter a number in the Enter integer value, but that number depends on how much memory you have (specifically, how much you want to “give” Firefox). If you have 256MB or less RAM, enter 4096 as the value. If you have 512MB of RAM, enter 6144 or 8192. If you have 128MB or less RAM, you may want to consider upgrading – memory is getting very inexpensive.

    6. Confirm that the new entry has been created and the integer value is correct

    7. If for any reason you wish to restore the default settings, change the browser.cache.memory.capacity integer value to -1 (that’s minus one).

    P.S. Yes, I am back from South by Southwest. Here’s a big flat screen in the convention center with crashed IE 7:
    http://preview.tinyurl.com/3cfvyp

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