With the End of Support For Firefox 3.6 not far behind us, Firefox 13 being released with Awesome new Features, and the Wonderful Firefox 14 for Android, those of you who are on an Older version of Firefox, or who moved from Firefox to another browser, may want to take a look at how Firefox is better. A few reasons why:
- Firefox Memory Management is FARRRRR better nowadays. With a Fresh Install of Firefox 4 on my test machine, Firefox 4 uses roughly 40MB of RAM. Firefox 13.0.1, uses 23MB. This is with the only tab open being about:memory. This is mainly due to the awesome work done by the Memshrink Team. Go read their status updates to see what work is being done in Firefox each week.
- Firefox is much faster. With features such as Type Inference, newer versions of Firefox are faster at everything from Startup to Javascript.
- Firefox has new Features. If you are still with an older version of Firefox, go read on what has been introduced into each new version that you are missing out on. These range from new HTML5 and CSS standards support, to security improvements, new web developer tools, and much more. Wikipedia has an excellent summary.
- Older versions of Firefox are quite insecure. With Rapid Release, only the ESR of firefox and the latest version receive security fixes. And an alarmingly high number of users stay on these insecure versions.
- And Much Much More.
Are Add-ons holding you back?
There have been several major changes in Firefox add-ons for new versions. In Firefox 10 and later, the majority of extensions are defaulted to compatible. With the other improvements to silent updates, removing the UAC prompt on Windows, etc. updating Firefox is worlds easier than it was even just a few months ago.
Are you having Troubles?
Another Awesome Feature in Firefox 13 is the Firefox Reset Feature! If you are having problems, or if you just want to try to make your Firefox any faster, go ahead and try it. Almost all your information will be saved (Extensions are the main thing that isn’t saved, but they are also the main cause of Firefox problems). It will probably make you wonder how you used Firefox before.
Try it out!
If you’ve been waiting to see if Firefox will improve before coming back, there isn’t a better time to do it than now. And if you have problems, want to make Firefox look like Firefox 3.6, or need anything at all, the SUMO Community is more than happy to help you out! Go to support.mozilla.org for all the help you can want.
