First of all, I would like to say I was a big fan of the Firefox browser. In the past, I had used Netscape Communicator as my browser of choice, but as times goes by, it just don’t cut it. Internet Explorer 5 had better features, better interface and a more modern feel to it than my little Netscape. I had no choice but to switch to Internet Explorer. And IE 6 was even better than IE 5 in so many ways.
However, then my friend introduced to me a rather unknown browser - Firefox! Well, at that time nobody had heard of it. It was just a little round ball with a fox head it in. But after downloading it and testing it out, I was quite impressed. It rendered webpages pretty fast. Sure, it had it share of problems but the problems were mainly caused by Microsoft who did not follow standards when it comes to web programming and design. Thus, a number of websites looked off in Firefox. But luckily for me, people start to take notice of Firefox and soon, a lot of them started using the browser. Best thing, they started demanding that websites be standards compliant so that Mozilla and Firefox would render the pages properly. Even websites in Singapore started respecting international set standards to cater for Mozilla and firefox users! It was amazing!
However, as version 2 of Firefox came out, I started noticing a serious problem. It took up a lot of system resources and my system started to slow down significantly. Sure, my PC isn’t top of the line, but at times, it could take up nearly half of my computer’s memory. With just around 3-4 tabs, it could use up 200MB of memory! I was shocked to see how much a resource hog it became. I had no choice, it was either I go out and get myself a high end system or I have to ditch Firefox and use Internet Explorer. With the new Internet Explorer 7 already out, the choice was obvious. Not even the infamous Internet Explorer took up so much resource!
I don’t know what happened to Firefox. But I think that they should solve the memory “leak” problem soon. I had read that this problem is known to the developers for some time, but it seemed that they didn’t bother to correct the problem. I have received a lot of version revisions from Firefox but nothing solved the memory leak problem for me. Perhaps I would just have to wait till version 3 comes out?