Although we all love to use Firefox, we have to admit it’s not the fastest app to launch. I always thought that its bottleneck was its modular XUL plug-in technology. After all, extracting plug-ins from compressed containers, then interpreting and integrating the contents to the app each time it launches, on-the-fly does take some CPU time, disk ops and memory allocation time.

Firefox 3 however has some improvements that should make it a phenomenal foe to IE7 when it comes to speed.

• Defragmentation, which has reduced memory usage after startup in more than one third.
• Image cache, fonts cache, back/forward cache, and more. They have all been tuned up to free used resources after certain time of inactivity.
• Uncompressed images are discarded from memory after a while if not active.
• More efficient animated GIFs storage in memory.
• About 400 memory leaks have been hunted and taken down thanks in part to better tools to identify them.
• A cycle collector takes care of objects referencing each other preventing either of them being cleared from memory.

There is a question on LinkedIn by Bill Gates.

How can we do more to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology?

An excellent question. I decided to answer and so I did, but once I submitted it, I decided I wanted to add more to the answer, so i deleted it and once I was done editing, I tried to submit it again. Unfortunately, LinkedIn didn’t notice that I had deleted by previous answer and told me I couldn’t answer the same question twice. This being the case, I’m going to blog my answer here.

The continual shift and evolution of the collective mindset and public memes will inevitably reach a phase where careers and lives dedicated to science and technology are not only attractive pursuits for young individuals but are also universally admired and appreciated as the gears of progress in the machinery of human existence and are respected as such.

One traditional field that has already settled its distinguished position is medicine. A career in this field is often encouraged (or at least mentioned as a suggestion) by parents. Key in this advice is not only the monetary considerations of the parent for the child’s future, but a career in medicine is universally viewed as being respectable, noble and beneficial. Simplifying this anthropologically; being the (parent of) the doctor in your tribe has obvious benefits.

The speed at which our culture and the ideas in it evolve is dynamic and manipulable. In order to popularize careers in science and technology, these avenues of opportunity must be presented as beneficial, respectable and attractive in our collective consciousness. This can be done through popular media (sitcoms, TV ads, movies) on school campuses but is also influenced by decisions made by governments and the language used by our political leaders.