Firefox 3 is well into its beta process. I’ve been using it for some time now, and it’s stable and fast. There are also lots of visual improvements that make it easier to see things like download status and bookmarks.

But much of the work is happening under the covers. Browsers are the new OS, runnning all sorts of internal applications. Whether they’re plug-ins or full-blown video games built in Flash, it’s not uncommon for my browser to be the biggest consumer of memory on my desktop. Yep, more than Word. More than Outlook.

As users demand richer and richer client-side experiences, something most web operators take for granted — the browser — is once again a thing to worry about. I’ve played with Blist and Liquidplanner, and both are pretty much full desktop apps that stretch my PC pretty hard.

The good news is the folks at Mozilla have been hard at work on memory consumption. Here’s a comparison across leading browsers.

Reading memory graphs, you can learn four things:

• If they’re horizontal, the application doesn’t “leak” memory. That means that over time, it doesn’t lose track of memory it’s claimed for itself, which ultimately consumes all the memory in the system. If they have a consistent angle over time, that means they leak memory.
• If they are spiky, they are constantly allocating and cleaning up memory (which is known as “garbage collection”) whereas if they’re less so, they don’t spend as much time cleaning up after themselves.
• If they don’t make it all the way to the end (which is the case for Safari) they crashed.
• The height of the graph line is, of course, how much memory they consumed to do the same thing.

The Firefox team should be proud of what they’ve accomplished in this graph; they’ve also made the browser faster in the process. What’s interesting about Open Source projects is that the “cool” ones with a following get their pick of brilliant developers. It’s like natural selection for coders. And Firefox is clearly winning the browser evolution game right now.

(It should also be noted that lots of PC-browser people have a hate-on for Apple right now, since the latest version of iTunes includes the Safari browser as a default update. There’s a great discussion of the security consequences of this. Folks berate Microsoft for using Windows dominance to get people using Internet Explorer. By bundling Safari as part of an iTunes patch, Apple is doing a similar thing.)

Interop’s Unconference event is shaping up nicely, with the moderators for the four topics now selected. Four members of Bitcurrent’s team will be helping to guide discussions on several topics, including web operations, virtualization, mobility, and security.

I’m the moderator for the Web Operations topic, which includes everything from web application deployment to delivery to security to acceleration to monitoring, and beyond!

Making sense of these technologies and how they help us deliver an application is difficult enough. However, we also have to be aware of where new technologies are headed and how concepts that we think we’re familiar with may change and alter the way we think of web applications.

In these sessions, we’ll examine some of these technologies and how they apply to today’s and tomorrow’s web applications. Our experts will provide a sampling of what’s important and relevant when we deal with web operations. Collectively, we’ll discuss, debate, scrutinize, and fawn over a large variety of technologies. Our intent is to leave the session smarter and dumber at the same time: we’ll learn about some things that we didn’t know, but also realize how much we need to learn yet. Web operations is a technology sandwich, with extra toppings - we have 2 hours to take a small bite.

I’ll be attending Mesh, in Toronto, this year. I’ve heard lots about it from many Canadian technologists, but haven’t been myself. It’s a two-day event in May with an impressive lineup.

I met Matthew Ingram, one of the guys behind the conference, in Toronto recently. Matt also writes a great technology blog with the Globe and Mail. He said the conference happened somewhat informally at first, but it’s now grown into a full-fledged event.

One of the things Mesh does right is support undergraduate attendance with discount tickets (already sold out!) for students. It’s the technology world version of the cheap tickets Broadway releases for starving actors.

It’s nearly April, and that means Interop.

Since 1994, I’ve been attending and participating in the Interop show. It’s an incredible endeavour; the world’s largest production network gets set up and torn down in just a few days. The show’s been around for so long, it has its own class A address block. Seriously, check it out.

One of the reasons for the show’s longevity has been its focus on education. Rather than just being a sales convention, it’s a source of learning for the internetworking industry. A while back, this meant proving that one VPN could talk to another. Before that, it was simply getting two Ethernet hubs to communicate.

Today, however, those interoperability issues are long over. Instead, we worry about how IT will work in the future, and how different services or different companies can interoperate.

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GigaOm, one of the leading tech blogs, launched its Structure conference recently. We’re going to be getting involved with the conference, helping to find speakers and vet topics.

In fairly sharp contrast to technology conference that focus on the “how” of infrastructure, Structure looks at the “why.” As one of the GigaOm folks told us, this event is more about the ways changing infrastructure can fundamentally alter an online business.

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Bitcurrent will be presenting a new kind of conference in Las Vegas this year. It’s called Unconference, and it’s an attempt to make the event more interactive and collaborative. We’re pretty psyched about the event, and looking forward to trying the concept out.

Since 1999, we’ve been organizing conferences for Interop: First on performance, following the publication of a book on the subject; then on web operations, data centers, and so on. This year, we’re running the SaaS and Cloud Computing track, and we’ve got a lineup of experts and panelists.

But even though that conference track has folks from Google, Amazon, Akamai, and a host of startups participating, it’s Unconference that keeps us up at night.

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