Firefox has a CPU usage issue and, consequently, can cause overheating problems in some laptops, particularly ultraportables. That’s what I’ve found over the last couple of years.But don’t take my word for it. This is documented on a Mozilla support page entitled “Firefox consumes a lot of CPU resources.” The page states: “At times, Firefox may require significant CPU [central processing unit] resources in order to download, process, and display Web content.” And forum postings like this one about a Dell Netbook are not uncommon: “Mini9 would get way too hot.”

Cite

I’ve noticed my laptop a tad warm of late, and this may just explain it as I have a lot of FF resource in use at many times. Anybody have a solution that doesn’t involve:

• less tabs
• giving up on firefox — which I happen to love
• buying a new notebook … not ready to pay for it yet

Thanks for your suggestions …

Great news! According to Net Applications Firefox has now crosses the 20 percent mark for worldwide browser usage.

Read more at the Mozilla blog.

It seems that not all of the users of Firefox 3 were previous users of Firefox 2 upgrading to the newer version. Prior to the release of Firefox 3, the Mozilla browser had roughly 48% of our browser marketshare, making it the clear leader. Post Firefox 3 release, our Mozilla Firefox usage is up to nearly 65%. It remains to be seen how this trend shows up on other sites but it’s looking good for Firefox to make up some significant ground overall. We’ll know more not long after the end of July.

In less than 24 hours, the latest release of Firefox has been downloaded more than 8 million (8000,000) times.

So far the reviews have all been positive, and while many themes and extensions are not yet available for 3, many have already been ported over and more are available every day. Additionally the default theme for Firefox 3 is much more eye catching than the corporate looking (read: boring) theme of Firefox 2.

Testing here at HTMLfixit.com over the release candidates and the final release show it to be an order of magnitude faster than Firefox 2 to load and to render, even on sub standard computers. It also doesn’t significantly increase it’s memory use over time as Firefox 2 did. The list of new and improved features is as long as your arm and has been detailed on dozens of sites so I won’t go into it here.

Interestingly Firefox 3 already accounts for nearly 10 percent of HTMLfixIT’s traffic, which goes to show that a good many of our techie visitors already know about it.

I knew I wasn’t the only one! News.com.au reports that the proportion of Australians using Mozilla Firefox to surf the web is among the highest in the world, according to internet trend research. The article goes on to say that almost one in three web users in the Oceania region – 31 per cent – were using Firefox, compared to 28 per cent in Europe and 21 per cent in the US.

Those are pretty interesting statistics, and I must admit that I was surprised at the comparatively low utilisation amongst US users. Any thoughts as to why?

Check out the full story: Australians embrace open source browser. The article has attracted some emotive comments on the News.com.au site, so it’s pretty clear that folks (I would guess a fair chunk of web developers) are still very passionate about their browser of choice!

Those of us that have used Firefox for a long time have known it was going to be big. It has taken the rest of the world some time, but according to ITwire, (who have it from Janco), show that IE usage has dropped 10% down to 63.9 and Firefox has risen to 17.4%.

Fantastic news for those of us who want an open standards compliant Internet. Plus Firefox is just cool. 🙂
There are some other tidbits in the ITWire article, so have a read.

The exciting news from Redmond is the release of Microsoft Firefox 2007 Professional Edition. Lot’s of exciting features!

(Don’t take this too seriously)