Firefox 1.0 is out today. For Mac Windows and Linux. Check it out and look for the Firefox advertising to really vamp up now. Or at least I hope!!
I've managed to get onto the firefox site a couple of times today, but what really gets me is that i cannot for the life of me find a Download Firefox link anywhere! Ummm..shouldn't this be big and bold on the page? On the developers page, there's the nightly builds and such, but where's the main download link? marketing 101...
oh dear have they started how they mean to carry on ?...if you cant find the download then the update patches are gonna be a stinger....and the uninstall switch,located next to the flibble pin on the giggle hyper-drive. GEM
Now if you visited my blog, you would see this http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.0/
Ahhh...there IS a big fat link to the download if you visit the site using IE. I guess it didn't occur to them that if I was using a prerelease version of firefox already, that I too might like to download the latest version. Oh well, I downloaded it via IE. (those guys need to hire a good marketing person).
No that's not a direct download link. That goes to a page that, a few days ago, didn't work since their servers were slammed with people. Millions of them. 2,109,079 downloads since the 9th. That's pretty impressive and doesn't count the ones that were hosted on other non mozilla servers.
Here's some minor testing I did with Firefox 1.0. I got this idea after reading your blog, Twister. Start Time 11:00 AM: Firefox inital opening (to standard mozilla start page): 19,684K Firefox with 2 Tabs (one on home page, the other on blank page): 19,788K Firefox with 2 tabs, both with content (both on home page): 20,012K Firefox with 2 tabs, with content, after five minutes of standard browsing on both tabs (content left on both tabs): 25,728K Closed one tab: 26,972K Firefox with 2 tabs again, standard browsing of pages (time: 11:15 AM): 33,084K Firefox with 3 tabs open (new tab is blank): 36,880K Firefox with 4 tabs open (content tabs): 38,696K Firefox back down to 2 tabs open (content tabs): 37,728K Firefox with 1 tab (content at 11:30 AM): 41,440K It seems as if Firefox doesn't like to re-allocate the ram it used for previous tabs. I wonder if it's a caching design and that's the way it's supposed to be. But if you browse with the same browser all day, I can easily see how your ram will get eaten up after 5+ hours.
OMG: You proved my theory? How cool. Even though I'd rather be wrong about all. Now I have to post this on Mozilla's forums. And yes anthonycea it has direct download links on that page.
I've noticed IE also does the same thing when browsing for long periods of time. I've seen my IE browser take up 60 MBs or more (and add to that multiple browsers over the course of a day). Needless to say, I don't think it's a firefox issue alone, but the way both browsers handle the caching of the pages it visits. For example, the simple function of the back button displays the page you were just at instantly. For the browser to do this, it stores a cached page in your temp inet files. The browser has to store that info internally. So the longer you browse, the larger that cache gets, and as a result, the more ram it needs to store. The interesting part is that when a tab is closed, the ram isn't allocated like it should be.