Firefox 4 is a memory hog. Over a period of a few hours, its memory consumption rose to approx 2Gb, at which point it became completely unresponsive. Since I needed to maintain a session for testing, it was very annoying that I had to kill the Firefox process. If this keeps up, I might have to use a different browser for testing.
With the task manager running, and Firefox active but doing absolutely nothing, the memory consumption grows by a few K every second. Such a pity. FF4 had a lot of promise, but I think we are going to see lots of complaints from users over the next few weeks. All of these issues should have been spotted and [click title to read more…]
Ask any Web developer to name a few browsers and you’ll get basically the same list: IE, FireFox, Safari, Opera and a few others. Ask them to name a few mobile browsers and the answers will vary considerably. If you want to be able to give a fairly complete answer to such a question, here’s a short list…
Android – strictly the name of Google’s Linux-based mobile OS, the built-in browser is based on WebKit. For added functionality, a popular free touch-based UI layer for the browser is Steel.
Kindle – a monochrome mobile e-book reader from Amazon, it comes with an experimental Web browser capable of basic text layouts. The UA reports the browser to be NetFront/3.3.
BlackBerry – the browser from RIM embedded [click title to read more…]
No site breakages yet, but then FF is my default browser, not IE. The tab management is nice. Also good to see that IE8 has a built-in Web Developer tool, but FF has had this for a long time. IE8 seems not so much innovation as catch-up. Accelerators, stealth surfing, some toolbar updates etc. Where have we seen these before? Oh yes, most of the other browsers. IE8 seems a bit slower than its predecessor, too. Supposedly more secure, but within the first day of its release a security flaw has been found. So we can expect a flood of patches. I will probably stick to FF, especially given the slower performance of IE8.