Memory leaks, Firefox, Flock and Opera

Moving from IE to Firefox

*Update: This is a old post that i wrote when Firefox 3 was still in early days of development and before the performance improvements were done.*

I switched from IE to Firefox 1.5 because of its amazing features like tabs, better session saver, add-ons and most of all its developer friendly tools like FireBug which to me came as a breather for web-development. And needless to say i never missed IE.

But then, as i became addicted to the tabbed browsing, like many others even i cultivated a bad habit of opening the links that i would like to read and come back later when i had time. so usually i had i atleast 15-20 tabs in each window and atleast 2-3 windows open. see it was just convenience…!!

Memory leaks in Firefox and moving onto Opera

But because of my bad habit of having so many tabs open, the memory hogging in Firefox was *ahem* unbearable…and lo…to add to that it also started crashing…and at times i
would restart the Firefox manually when the memory usage was very high and i was hoping that this would be fixed in the future versions, but nothing much happened on those lines and i was looking for some alternative, and then i tried Opera (without the ads 😉 and it had all the features that i wanted except for the FireBug. But hey..that was okay..when i had to test my sites, i would go to Firefox, but for normal web-browsing, i never missed Firefox, just the way i never missed IE when i switched to Firefox. Opera was just freakin…awesome..!!! and i loved it for the memory footprint that it occupied and it never crashed for me (though, YMMV 😉 and to add to that, Opera had lot more features like integrated mail client, newsgroups, saving multiple sessions, needless to say i loved it 😉

Flock

So when i came across the beta release of flock, i was just curious to try it out and my first thoughts were, oh its a replica of Firefox with few more functionalities, primary among those being a integrated access to various social networking sites from its sidebar. well..which was not bad..*ahem* quite good, just like you don’t want to open different mail clients for each and every mail account that you have, you would like to have an integrated access to all these social networking sites instead of logging into each one of them. so this integration was quite a welcome feature given the fad for social networking sites. But, hey…is that reason enough for altogether a new browser..? i don’t think so..but to be fair, Flock also has other features like Web Clipboard, Blogging client, Media bar, and obviously the sidebar.

But another interesting point that i came across was regarding the memory usage comparison of Flock vs firefox 3.0. well just to double check on this, i fired up all my tabs in Opera in Flock and also in firefox 3.0 and boy Opera beats them all and Firefox crashes as usual :), but though, Flock initially used more memory footprint than Firefox, it never crashed :), which was interesting and i’m just curious what tweaks did Flock guys do to the Firefox engine and why is firefox still not fixing it? i see that firefox 3.0 has loads of features but why are they not fixing this serios issue of frequent crashes..? what will we do with those features when the browser would crash anyway..? well in that sense , kudos to Flock and i hope to see how flock catches up with the new versions of the firefox 3.0 engine. And if they do manage to catch up, then i wouldn’t see why people who wants to move to firefox 3.0 should not move to Flock if not my fav browser Opera 🙂

But hey..i am not going to switch my loyalty from Opera to this new browser for just the side-bar 😉

Opera ROCKS!!!