The day all Firefox fans have been waiting for is finally upon us: Firefox 3.5 has been officially released.

It has been 54 weeks since Firefox 3 was released and set a record for the number of unique downloads in one day with 8,249,092.  While there has been no major publicity push this time around, it is still sure to be a busy day for Mozilla’s servers.

One of the first things you see when you visit GetFirefox.com, the official page for downloads, is the claim that it is the fastest version of the popular browser yet.  While I’m not personally running any sort of benchmarking software, I can say that my Gmail account and Google Reader launched a lot faster after I upgraded then when I launched this morning on the last build of Firefox 3.

The amount of system memory that Firefox uses has been one of the biggest complaints from users for quite some time, and the announcement of performance upgrades states that the new version will use less memory, it fails to give any specifics.  They also state the newly added XPCOM cycle collector will continually clean up unused memory, and that they have plugged hundreds of former memory leaks for smoother usage.

Again, speaking from a wholly unscientific viewpoint, I had become quite dissatisfied with Firefox 3 as of late as I was seeing over 500,000 kilobytes of memory usage from just opening the program.  Taking a look at my Windows Task Manager right now, with five tabs open in Firefox, I’m only seeing a report of just over 208,000 kilobytes being used.  Although, in comparison, I also have five tabs open in Google’s Chrome browser as I write this, and it is only using 121,500 kilobytes.  Not a major difference as it is one tab less, but it still makes you wonder if Firefox 3.5 will suffer the memory leakage of its predecessors.

Only time will tell if version 3.5 will clean up everything that was plaguing the previous version, but we won’t know for until the program is in to the hands of users to test it more thoroughly.  So what are you waiting for?  Go download Firefox 3.5!

Related:

Entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 3:19 pm under Internet.

Read more entries by Sean P. Aune.
Stumble It!