Farewell to Android
Klout is FarmVille for grown-ups
Does Flash matter on mobile?
What is Twitter?
Since upgrading to Firefox 3 a few months ago, I've been pretty impressed by the performance of Mozilla's latest browser. Generally, page loading times seem slightly quicker, although several of my add-ons are still not supported by it, which is something you have to unfortunately resign yourself to every time you upgrade Firefox.
However, one major problem that I was experiencing was a severe memory leak when Firefox would suddenly hog my RAM and CPU for about a minute causing the browser to hang, or even crash. Although memory leaks have been an ongoing problem with Firefox, this was far more serious and persistent that usual. The simple solution, it seems, was to sign out of the Gchat module in Gmail. Simply by being signed in, Gchat could suddenly conflict with Firefox for no apparent reason. A quick Google search revealed that I wasn't alone either with desperate users flocking to Mozilla's forum to find a solution.
It seems incredible that Mozilla didn't even notice that one of the Internet's most widely used web based e-mail clients was causing this problem when they developed Firefox 3. In fact, it's not the only basic glitch I've noticed with Firefox 3. Some JavaScripts, that worked fine in Firefox 2, don't seem to work for me in the latest version of the browser.
Let's hope that this is not a sign of things to come with future releases of Firefox. The add-ons incompatibility issue is already annoying enough but incompatibility with basic components such as JavaScript or IM clients is not really acceptable (unless of course you're Microsoft).
Nick, thanks for the article. This one was baffling me as well until it dawned on me to shut down the internal GTalk client within GMail as you state. For users who favor GTalk, you can continue running the client efficiently and without memory burdens, but make sure to run GTalk independently and outside of your GMail program. ISFA FF3+ add-on's, this is a major conversation ATM. Mozilla is staying the course and re-emphasizing that you use outside dev's programs at your own risk. FF can be made quite unstable with many. One of the traditional best security add-on's customizegoogle dot com has become a thorn in Google's side. Chrome BETA adds more competition to the space which is always a healthy thing for users, but after trialling it for a week, my advice to non-expert users is to stay away until it is RTM as bugs still abound.
Glad it worked for you JD. I've noticed that in fact, I'm still suffering from a memory leak problem despite deactivating the Gchat client although it's not as serious. As you say, Mozilla can't take any responsibility for add-ons that make Firefox 3 unstable so I'm going to remove all but the most essential ones and hope that works. At the moment, it's just suddenly kicking in and hogging my RAM once every few hours or so and it's really annoying.