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Too many of the JS/DHTML toolkits have the "you must use our APIs for everything, including how you manipulate strings" disease. Some are cool, for example TIBET, which looks a lot like Smalltalk.

From Harry Feucks' blog:

As far as I know, Tibet is the only Open Source project today which would be capable of making this happen

It means "I put my motherfucking balls in Mozilla-Foundation's Mitchell Baker's nigger-cock worshiping mouth."

Also, see Gervase's blog entry, and it is also on digg.

I find it completely insane that people consider Firefox, a browser where memory leaks are classified as "features," to be a viable application deployment platform. A web browser is only as strong as its weakest open window. The vast majority of browsers-with-no-extensions-installed have no protection against crashes at all. The only cure to this problem is auto-saving of documents.

Linux, Mac OS X, and even recent Windows releases are actually quite stable if you use good drivers. Why tie an important application to the weakest link in any system (the network) and a foundation that was clearly not made to handle such demands (a web browser)?

Interestingly, over at Asa Dotzler's (full time Firefox troll) blog you have a thoroughly childish analysis of IE7 that first
- claims credit for it all
- identifies superior features or implementations
- suggests Firefox get said features

The only thing Firefox is (or was) is a wakeup call to MS. I'm glad it happened, but the Moz org needs to take a good hard look at themselves and stop thinking they're the second coming of Christ.

I know the Acid2 test doesn't tell the whole story, but Safari passes it. Opera 9 comes damn close. Mozilla browsers are a damn mess.

JS, unlike Python, was a rushed little hack for Netscape 2 that was then frozen prematurely during the browser wars, and evolved significantly only once by ECMA. So its early flaws were never fixed, and worse, no virtuous cycle of fine-grained community feedback in the form of standard library code construction, and revision of the foundational parts of the language to better support the standard library and its common use-cases, ever occurred.

This is changing, finally. Great toolkits such as MochiKit and Dojo have been developed and disseminated (with docs and tests, even). I should also mention OpenJSAN.org as a welcome development. We can finally see the outlines of a standard JS library system. Of course, this space is young and necessarily fragmented. I will blog some concrete thoughts soon on how browsers can expedite the evolution of a proper standard library.

But what about the core JS language? It's not going to go away, or turn into Python. It needs to evolve, and to co-evolve with libraries that become standard. How can this all happen in relatively short order, and on the web?

As noted here before, I am working in ECMA TG1 with colleagues from Mozilla, Adobe, and Microsoft. Adobe's interest lies not only in ActionScript, but also in SpiderMonkey, which has been embedded in Acrobat for years.

Personally, I feels XUL's only achilles heel is javascript.

You're in luck :-) Python bindings are coming to XUL.

That language needs a serious overhawl if anyone is to be able to use it without all that hassle.

Mozilla is working with ECMA on that too. See Brendan's comments about ECMAScript 4/JavaScript 2.

ben disagrees
Edit: In the comments, Boris and David pointed out that I misread the code, and that this is a global preference so that there are no more than 8 cached pages for the entire session, not per tab. My initial posting had claimed that it was per-tab. Oops!

And a detailed explanation of the feature and it's values can be found here.

That is a very normal amount of RAM useage for Firefox. If you want to tweak Firefox's RAM usage then you can read the Mozillazine Forums's One and only memory useage thread

While the default setting of "use all memory available" might be a bit unfortunate, this is tuneable. (After all, you can't tuna fish, but you can tune a, well, browser.)

Not an FF fan, but trying to be fair.

• Opera has none of these problems. So, the quote from the Mozillazine blog shown below, although it is typical, is not supported by the facts.
  
  
• Whatever causes the CPU hogging bug is definitely associated with extreme memory use. No doubt there are leaks, but this is not a leak, since it is not necessarily associated with greater use of Firefox.
  
  
• Users often report that just leaving Firefox open overnight causes CPU hogging and extreme memory use.
  
  
• The problems are the same in Mozilla browser.
  
  
• It's good to test Firefox with a laptop in a quiet environment. When you hear the laptop fan begin to run while there is no activity, you know Firefox has begun to suck CPU cycles.
  
  
• Putting a computer into standby or hibernation often makes the CPU hogging bug much worse. That's why Firefox users sometimes just leave their computers on.
  
  
• When a computer takes a long, long time to start from standby, you know Firefox is taking CPU cycles. What about coming out of standby makes Firefox unstable? No other program has that problem.
  
  

Ben was mistaken, it's cached globally.

See this comment by Boriz Zbarsky:

Ben, those numbers are NOT per tab. The bfcache is global; there are never more than 8 pages total in bfcache (and you need to have 1GB of RAM for this to happen). Most users have 3 or 5 pages in bfcache at any given time.

and this comment by David Baron:

The point of bug 292965 was that the pref should be global, not per-tab. Is that not working correctly?

(Boris and David are back-end developers; they have much more working knowledge of this than Ben does.)

Also, there are actual memory leaks in Firefox. See this weblog post about progress on that. However, as that weblog post says as well, most excessive memory usage that people are seeing is entirely due to faulty extensions.

Ben was mistaken, it's cached globally.

See this comment by Boriz Zbarsky:

Ben, those numbers are NOT per tab. The bfcache is global; there are never more than 8 pages total in bfcache (and you need to have 1GB of RAM for this to happen). Most users have 3 or 5 pages in bfcache at any given time.

and this comment by David Baron:

The point of bug 292965 was that the pref should be global, not per-tab. Is that not working correctly?

(Boris and David are back-end developers; they have much more working knowledge of this than Ben does.)

Also, there are actual memory leaks in Firefox. See this weblog post about progress on that. However, as that weblog post says as well, most excessive memory usage that people are seeing is entirely due to faulty extensions.

I've been waiting for Mozilla to implement ... ACID2 compliance for a while.

Why on earth would you be waiting for acid2 'compliance'?? Acid2 is nothing but a collection of pretty arbitrarily selected known browser bugs. It will be good when they will be fixed, but the same can be said about the hundreds of other bugs.

Acid2 got released at the worst possible time for Gecko development -- right in the middle of a beta cycle. Since fixing all the Acid2 bugs requires fundamental architecture work, that meant that to fix them Gecko had to finish the beta cycle, ship a 1.8 final, _then_ start taking the fixes for Acid2 stuff.

Actually, Orlowski reasons for deriding the Mozilla team in "wander[ing] off into Lotus-eating land" are:

"creating esoteric frameworks". Later we learn that means "Creating a neat C++ framework when what the world really needs a non-Microsoft browser is nothing but a deriliction of duty: a piece of vanity code". Except http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009698 .html/ shows XUL creation was a direct effect of AOL pressure on advertising and netscape portal integration

"note-perfect bug tracking systems that only a nerd could appreciate". Anyone who ever looked at bugzilla's internal knows it's a quick and ugly hack who could never mobilise a whole team for years.

So when Orlowski writes jokingly "corrupt suits at AOL" "betrayed the Great Noble Project" he's right, and when he rants about nerds he's dead wrong (you'll notice once the inspired suits where taken of the picture the nerds did produce a successful browser).

If anything, returning on Orlowski's pontifications today only emonstrates the depths of his prejudices and cluelessness.

Adblock has a memory leak, you should use Adblock Plus, check out http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3548 28

Look at the java2D demos too to get ideas of what you can do with
this, within a 2D window.

I only have adblock and bugmenot, so it's not extensions causing the problem.

No, it is extensions causing the problem. Specifically adblock. Adblock appears to be a horribly written piece of shit -- it leaks memory all over the damn place. Use Adblock Plus instead -- I think it still leaks memory a bit, but I can surf for several days without reloading Firefox and be at <200M usage, while I'd hit 400M with Adblock in a day.

And I've actually added a couple extensions since switching to Adblock Plus, so if anything my memory should be up, not down. Adblock Plus still works with FilterSet.G, and it also adds whitelists. There are a few esoteric features it doesn't have compared to Adblock, but I certainly haven't missed them.

Extensions are the really powerful bit of Firefox, and something matched by no other browser in ease of development and capability. Unfortunately they seem to also be prone to memory leaks. Firefox, in and of itself, doesn't leak memory (much), but a lot of extensions and plugins (Flash) do. If you want to test this, go for it -- start Firefox in Safe Mode and watch its memory usage over time. Note that plugins (fucking Flash) are still enabled, so if that's what's leaking memory (yes) then you'll still see memory usage increase over time. Surf to sites that don't require plugins and you shouldn't see much of a memory leak though. Remove the Flash plugin (or maybe use NoScript or Flashblock -- although I've had many issues with the latter, including conflicts with GreaseMonkey scripts) and you'll eliminate what's the second biggest memory leak.

But, really, ditch Adblock and replace it with Adblock Plus. You'll solve most of your problems right there. It's the biggest memory leak I've seen in a long, long time.

According to IE, Mozilla developer Gervase Markham's blog is "suspicious", but arbitrary code from unknown websites is safe to execute.

There's a "In Soviet Russia" joke in there, but I can't put my finger on it.

Luckily, like many previous Mozilla versions, it also comes with the "Modern" theme, which is easily selected.
This of course goes well with the Modern icon pack. Firefox has "always" had big memory leaks, as far as I've noticed, and Firefox has always had the "bug" where the page rendering is coupled to the entire UI. Firefox is unusable when it takes a half-second or more to switch between a 'relatively' large (cough, 20) number of tabs, and can take thirty seconds or more to load a plugin like Shockwave or Java, even on a fast machine. Then there are all of the security issues with Firefox, like that they're more or less supporting spyware tracking, nevermind the issue where it ignores most Java security; it's the only browser I've seen anymore which actually gets affected by Java Viruses, even Internet Explorer (6 SP2 or better) won't. They also tend to have a policy of inserting code which may not be stable, and may not be in the best interest of...anyone.

Also, it's not incompatible with particularly useful extensions. Even ForecastFox and Reminderfox work, as do EnigMail nightlies, Adblock (and Adblock Plus with automatic filter update extensions), Googlebar, StumbleUpon, even the web developer toolbar, and various tab browsing functionality can be replicated with Nightly builds of Multizilla. The only thing I can't easily replicate on SeaMonkey is GreaseMonkey (ironically). Ancient versions depend on Mozilla 1.7 or so, newer versions want Firefox 1.5, though I'm told there'll be a Seamonkey-compatible sometime soon.

And while Firefox may have originally been meant to "trim the fat" of Mozilla, the per-tab usage of SM vs. Firefox isn't a substantial difference (about 30MB difference on 100 tabs, which at that point is a drop in the bucket), and Mozilla/SeaMonkey also include the email client (which only adds about 4MB, compared to 40+ for Thunderbird, and 60+ or so for Outlook 2003), and can rack up more savings the more you use it to replace other things, like IRC client and Calendar (which now has a working version for Seamonkey). It also tends to render pages faster, with less CPU time, and less CPU time used for 'idle pages'. I can't count the number of times I've had to kill Firefox and restart it because some random tab or another started using 100% CPU time, even when it wasn't the active one. Animated GIFs also made the browser crazy (though I was getting that as late as December or so, before Firefox was finally purged permanently from my machine). Between SeaMonkey and Miranda, I save about 150MB of memory and a lot more CPU power compared to using other (standard) possible combinations of applications.

Found this really useful link summarizing the raison d'etre of Seamonkey and offers a comparison to Firefox/Thunderbird:

Also a discussion on mozillazine: http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=7 957

Ignore the AC that replied to you, those instructions are not any good for building any Mozilla release be it SeaMonkey, Firefox, Thunderbird or others.

Use the following links.
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Build_Documen tation
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Category:Buil d_Documentation
For help
http://irc.mozilla.org/
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=42

It is being worked on. I don't think there are many people on the team, which could explain why it is taking so long. They post status updates on the calander blog: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar/

Lightning is still being worked on, and progress is happening, as detailed in the calender weblog http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar/. The project page itself is here http://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendar:Lightning. It's good to see progress happening - for those of us using Thunderbird in a work environment I think it's obvious that a Lightning style integrated calender will be an important part of mozilla's mix - those that currently use outlook won't easily switch to Thunderbird due to loss of functionality.

God, of course, is the ultimate hacker in the "master programmer" sense - one only needs to briefly peruse of some of the things he has made to see that. The elegance of design in some biological systems is breathtaking. When you compare human DNA to chimpanzee DNA, you see they are around 96% the same. Some people see this as evidence that both evolved from the same original species; I see it simply as sensible code reuse.

Well, Javascript 2 is being developed. ^_^ Note that the blog post is Brendan Eich by the guy who designed javascript initially. Whether anything will come of it I don't know. (And I think python "support" for Firefox isin the long range plans, but for use in XULRunner apps, not webpages.)

Have a look here:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3714 80

Ben Goodger 20060122: Battling Firefox Bloat http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009620 .html
David Baron 20060114: Please file good memory leak bugs ! (bug 320915)
http://dbaron.org/log/2006-01#e20060114a
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32091 5

Helping is as easy as following the directions

Have a look here:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3714 80

Ben Goodger 20060122: Battling Firefox Bloat http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009620 .html
David Baron 20060114: Please file good memory leak bugs ! (bug 320915)
http://dbaron.org/log/2006-01#e20060114a
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32091 5

Helping is as easy as following the directions

You should run, not walk, to the Memory usage thread at MozillaZine. Nobody can seem to demonstrate any memory problems with Firefox. Show them how just yahoo.com consumes 180 MB of memory and finally convince those guys there's a problem!

pretty usefull: https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=1843&application=firefox

"FireBug is a new tool that aids with debugging Javascript, DHTML, and Ajax. It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter."

thanks http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2006/ 01/firebug.html for the tipp

About the video acceleration, I've already submitted a few bug reports.

The problem is known on the forums, try searching for video acceleration on this page: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2062 13/

Thanks for the rest of the info :)

Lots of comments already, so I'll be surprised if anybody sees this one, but here goes, because I have a solution. I'll ignore the fact that integrating non-standards into the browser at an HTML level fragments the web and assume that FF is going to do this no matter what, so at least they should do it properly.

Mistake 1: Calling this a "ping" is the first big mistake here. It obfuscates the purpose and gets everybody reaching for their tinfoil hats and disablement extensions.

*** Solution 1: This feature should be called (to the user) "Click-Track Accelerator" and CLEARLY and openly explain that you are being click-tracked anyway, but by using this feature (enabled by default, but see #2), your browsing experience will be faster. This is a fact.

Mistake 2: Allowing any site to do this is asking for abuse including DDOS attacks on competitors and any number of other things that were possible before but even easier now (and all look bad for Firefox).

*** Solution 2: Include in the preferences a "Click-Track Accelerator Whitelist" which by default contains "adwords.google.com" (or whoever else donates to the Mozilla foundation [just kidding]). When a new click-track ping is attempted, prompt the user to allow, deny, or add to whitelist. Also have a checkbox for "Always allow for same server" (which is on by default and lets servers do what they can do anyway, but quicker).

Mistake 3: There is no facility defined for servers to identify this capability in the client so no servers will even use this! (Mozilla -- you're not Microsoft, so get over yourselves)

*** Solution 3: Some kind of HTTP header to identify this feature should be used. See GrangerX's post on http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/darin/archives/0095 94.html .

If you add this to your userContent.css, links that have a ping attribute will be green:

a[ping] {
    color: green !important;
}

You could also do something like this:

a[ping] {
    -moz-opacity: 0.5 !important;
}
a[ping]:hover {
    -moz-opacity: 1 !important;
}

so that the links would be transparent until you hover over them

or if you're using a nightly trunk, file a bug report on that...

Most of the "Firefox memory leak" problems are turning out to be poorly coded extensions, such as Adblock. Adblock's memory management problems were fixed just a few days ago. Try the tips on reducing memory usage, and you'll almost certainly find that the "memory leaks" disappear.

I'd say, in the UK ... they are mainly in places were the user is forced to user a certain well-known browser ... due to slow organisations (or the slow IT departments thereof) who don't like change.

I don't think that's fair at all. I love Firefox, but using it at the office sucks. The senior developers love their security to such an extent that their browser is useless for using the intranet at work. At home, I can choose not to use sites with ActiveX or whatever, and frankly I've never found this a problem. At work, I have no choice, and it's a showstopper.

The problem attitude is exemplified by the mess that is CAPS, introduced in Firefox 1.5. We used to be able to set a single preference in about:config to stop Firefox blocking links to local files. Now you have to set a whole range of options, and the senior devs are deliberately not advertising the equivalent of the old option because for some reason they think this will help us. Their super-new, highly-configurable system apparently can't handle the single most obvious configuration -- allow unchecked access only to machines on my own network -- or if it can, the docs are so cryptic that a whole group of us who looked, all experienced Firefox users, couldn't work out how to do it in ten minutes without basically listing every machine explicitly in the CAPS entry.

In any case, the result is the same either way: a well known problem for many business users remains inadequately addressed, Firefox developers continue to think they're doing the world a favour, and businesses continue to consider Firefox substandard regardless of its other merits. The solution is easy, but first the senior developers have to accept that they don't know their users' requirements better than their users.

Firefox is the most unstable program commonly used with Windows.

Memory leaks in some situations but I can't put my finger on what is causing it.

If memory leaks bother you a lot, you might consider switching to Firefox trunk, where

* Some of the bigger memory leaks have been fixed.

* There is a tool you can use to track down (or help Firefox developers track down) what causes the remaining leaks.

Unfortunately, Firefox trunk is a bit crashy right now, at least for some users. You could follow The Burning Edge for a while and then download a trunk build once the most frequent crashes are fixed.

This wiki page also talks about some non-leak causes of high memory usage.

You have to partly disable video acceleration for some types of content to play properly in some pages.

I have neither noticed problems like this nor read bug reports like this. Can you file a bug, including information about your graphics card and driver, with at least a URL and preferably with a reduced testcase?

I guess the bugs were as minor as he claimed...

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/josh/archives/2006/ 01/unofficial_intel_mac_firefox_b.html

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3640 92&highlight=mcafee

Hours of things you can do to stop memory Memory Leaks in Firefox.

Firefox is the most crashy, CPU hogging, memory leaking software in common use on Windows.

Somehow Opera never has any of these problems. So, it is possible to have a well-behaved browser.

Thunderbird has S/MIME support built in, no plugins needed.

Sure, but as the page you linked to demonstrates, it's still not as easy to use as Qbertino wants. Most obviously, there's no "Make Key" button to click. Instead, there's a multi-step procedure that starts with "Take your XYZ123 Certificate...".

I suppose that you can argue for and against giving a mail client the ability to generate self-signed certificates, which is what having a one-step "Make Key" button implies.

The Sunbird/Calendar development team keeps a development weblog. Last updated 5 days ago. Oracle also has (as of May 2005, anyway) three employees working on the Lightning project.

Now you can access the yahoo and hotmail accounts from your thunderbird email client using extensions instead of external programs. Available here Lastest versions of hotmail, yahoo extensions here

Oh man. I wish it was better, but it's really bad. Overtraining kills it. Accidentally marking something as spam, and then unmarking it kills it so you get much more spam for weeks. Asa Dotzler thinks that 90-95% hit ratio is good.

Thunderbird has S/MIME support built in, no plugins needed. So does Apple Mail, so you can communicate with Mac users.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Installing_an_SMIME_cert ificate

I use it. It works. Mailing lists tend to fsck up signatures, though.

If you had 1.5rc2 installed: Scott MacGregor wrote that the 1.5 release has no changes since rc2. So you won't need to update unless you really want that build date (like me)

Check this out: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Talk:Memory_Leak

More than enough people have been having trouble with Firefox lately; there's always been a memory leak in Firefox since 1.0, but with 1.5 it has just gotten worse. I run no extensions, no frills, and barely visit sites with flash; usually I just hop on gmail.

And after three hours of mostly idle time I find my machine dedicating more than 128M of RAM to the browser, and it keeps going up without any user interaction.

Please open source contributors, who will fix Firefox?