Firefox 4
So Firefox 4.0 has been released. It looks slicker and been reorganised a bit. Apparently a lot of stuff under the covers for performance.
Shame I'm not really seeing it. It runs like a dog at work. After a bit of tinkering this seems to be due to... Ooo, first off, I've got a resize anchor on my textbox, how cool is that!
Sorry, I digress, the sluggishness seems to be down to hardware acceleration. Hardware acceleration is a great thing as it allows certain tasks to be offloaded from the CPU to specialist hardware - such as the GPU. This means complex things like making things look pretty and slick can be processed by hardware built specifically for doing said task.
Unfortunately, the company I work for provide very old graphics cards which just about meet the requirements for hardware acceleration, but are incapable of doing a good job of it. The end result, things are sluggish. Disabling the hardware acceleration and shifting the work back to the CPU provides a noticeable boost to performance.
Not sure what other changes have been made, Firefox is still the number three user of memory on my computer, right after a SQL Server and Visual Studio - which are permitted to take vast amounts of memory. Other Enterprise server software I'm running seem to be able to manage their memory far better.
Shame I'm not really seeing it. It runs like a dog at work. After a bit of tinkering this seems to be due to... Ooo, first off, I've got a resize anchor on my textbox, how cool is that!
Sorry, I digress, the sluggishness seems to be down to hardware acceleration. Hardware acceleration is a great thing as it allows certain tasks to be offloaded from the CPU to specialist hardware - such as the GPU. This means complex things like making things look pretty and slick can be processed by hardware built specifically for doing said task.
Unfortunately, the company I work for provide very old graphics cards which just about meet the requirements for hardware acceleration, but are incapable of doing a good job of it. The end result, things are sluggish. Disabling the hardware acceleration and shifting the work back to the CPU provides a noticeable boost to performance.
Not sure what other changes have been made, Firefox is still the number three user of memory on my computer, right after a SQL Server and Visual Studio - which are permitted to take vast amounts of memory. Other Enterprise server software I'm running seem to be able to manage their memory far better.