Firefox 3.5 faster?

Ever since I installed Firefox 3.5 I felt it was a little bit more
sluggish, bloated and slow compared to previous versions, but I liked
some of the new features.

But today, I just had enough. To state it plainly: Firefox 3.5 IS SLOW!

I installed Firefox 2.0 and it flies. It must be like 3 times faster
and 2 time less resource intensive. One of the things I also disliked
about 3.5 is that sometimes when I’m not doing anything, it would
start to do “something” that requires hard disk, so my disk would get
really busy.

I hope Firefox developers get their stuff together and makes the
browser better, not just more feature-full. Some of the features in
3.5 are really strange. For example, the + button to open new tab.
There has been a toolbar button to open a new tab since forever (I
always add it after installing). Instead of simply making that button
shown by default, they apparently decided to do copycat job of some
other browser’s feature. That was very cheap move, esp. since I find
the toolbar much more useful because it is always at the same place on
the screen and I don’t have to search for it.

Competition is moving forward (Chrome, Opera, …) and it seems
Firefox is losing the direction. It there wasn’t for great plugins, it
would lose market share quickly.

Update: Since Firefox 7, things have been fixed. Firefox 14 I'm currently using is the fastest browser on the net.

Tweet to @mbabuskov Milan Babuškov, 2009-11-05