Firefox 3 not a POSIMO any more.

I have not been a fan of Firefox 3 since it's release. I found it slow and clunky and used more resources than Firefox 2 even though it claimed to be faster and use less resources. I even called it a POSIMO :lol: I had enough of it on one of my machine and removed it. I was bored yesterday and decided to put Firefox 3 Portable on one of my machines and play around with it. After a few hours of installing my 17 extensions and a few themes I like and making a few about:config tweaks I was ready to give it a good work out.

Wow big difference from the FF 3 I had removed. The speed difference was immediately noticeable. It is as fast as Opera and in some cases like Gmail, iGoolge, and Google Calendar it's much faster than Opera. These are sites that can give browsers fits and are good sites to test on. FF 3 handled them great.

I also noticed the resource usage was much better than the FF3 I had just dumped. Not as good as Opera but better than FF 2. It still hits 100 MB but it releases the RAM much better than FF 2. I tested this by launching FF 2 on one machine and FF 3 Portable on another. I navigated to the exact same sites on each and FF 3 Portable used about 40 Mb less RAM. The "peak" memory was about the same so they both hit the same level but the actual memory and virtual memory were much lower in FF 3 which means it's releasing it bitter than FF 2.

The new features are very nice to. The new Download Manager and Pass Word Manager and Zoom especially. These were over shadowed before for me because of the poor performance but not any more. All my extensions except 3 work perfectly. The Google Tool Bar I dumped because it's not really needed. All it's functionality is built in to FF or easily replaced with lighter extensions. Cooliris Previews still works but the preview window sticks open and doesn't close automatically like it should. You have to click on the page to close the preview window which is a small annoyance. I also used an extension called Drag De Go that doesn't work with FF 3 but I found a replacement that has similar functionality until Drag De Go is updated.

I don't know if it's the fact I am using FF 3 Portable or just the fresh set up but it works very nice and I like it better than FF 2 because of the obvious speed difference and the nice new features.

I'm still not impressed with the installation version of FF3 because it gives me nothing but issues forcing an uninstall which has happened with two completely different versions. FF3 Portable however doesn't give me any issues, which I find very strange.

I'm still not impressed with the installation version of FF3 because it gives me nothing but issues forcing an uninstall which has happened with two completely different versions. FF3 Portable however doesn't give me any issues, which I find very strange.

Maybe it is the portable version and not the new set up that is giving me the much improved performance. No matter because I am really into portable apps now. So much easier to "install" and backing up or moving to another machine is as simple as copy and paste. The new FF 3 Portable set up I have just copied to my other machines and thumb drives. I also have never had an issue updating portable apps like I have with installed versions of programs.

Yeah the install version sucks on my machine but portable has no such issues.