Today, I ran an upgrade of my laptop, which runs Ubuntu. A nice little feature that came with this particular upgrade is a working installation of Firefox 3. About 2 months ago, I upgraded to Firefox 3, but it was in an unusable state, so back to Firefox 2.0 I went. With this working version though, I have to say that a downgrade back to Firefox 2 won’t happen again.

There were algorithmic improvements to the code base in Firefox 3 that makes it faster and more efficient. As a person who often makes do with 1 Gb of RAM (imho, Linux needs no more than this for any normal needs…) the efficiency that I’ve seen from this code base is heads above the memory consuming monster that was Firefox 2. For those of who have 4gb of ram, you may not feel the pain when a program slowly leaks memory until a `killall -9` is in order, but it is a giant pain, and a manisfestation of careless coding. I’ve seen this version of Firefox run much more cleanly, and with less memory leakage than Firefox 2 could have ever hoped to have. Clean, beautiful algorithms manifest themselves in more ways than just memory consumption.

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