Mozilla Firefox 2 RC2 Released

Shining Celebi writes "According to the Mozilla Developer Center, Firefox 2 Release Candidate 2 is available for download. This looks like it could be the final release candidate, and offers a tweaked UI and improved stability over RC1, plus, of course, all the new in Firefox 2.0 features."

Comments

Bloat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have these new features added additional bloat to the once-lean Firefox? I mean the anti-phishing thing and spellchecker are both cool, but why not leave these two things (particularly the spellchecker) as extensions?

Re:Bloat?

[voice_of_all_reason]

Heck, we didn't all buy 2gb of ram for nuthin!

The ultimate future of firefox: http://www.pbfcomics.com/archive/PBF036AD-Hugbot.j pg

Re:Bloat?

[Frosty Piss]

It's not the "bloat" that bothers me, I'm a "kitchen sink" guy. It's the memory management issues. It's a pig. I'm still using it, but I've been looking very hard at Opera.

Re:Bloat?

[cheater512]

It uses memory the same way Linux does.

If there is memory just sitting around doing nothing then why not use it?
I love it. My (Linux) system rarely uses less than the full gig of ram I have yet it never swaps.

Re:Bloat?

[SeaFox]

I mean the anti-phishing thing and spellchecker are both cool, but why not leave these two things (particularly the spellchecker) as extensions?

Because most people are too stupid to install extensions, so if the browser doesn't come with X feature out-of-the-box, they assume it doesn't exist at all and say "Look! I.E. has it so it's better!"

Even if you point out it can be added they still say it's worse because you have to go and download it separately. "Ugh! So much WORK!"

Re:Bloat?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the real question is, why force people to download extensions to use these sort of simple features that are useful to just about everyone? I have a number of extensions on Firefox, and many of them are just adding simple features that Firefox ought to have, like spell check, tab resurrection and form auto-fillout (all of which, I believe, Opera has.) Extensions slow down Firefox, and having too many can bring it to a crawl, even on a relatively fast machine. Putting these kind of features in Firefox wouldn't significantly add to memory usage or clutter the UI too badly, and they're extremely useful. Another reason why the anti-phishing is included by default is that it's aimed at precisely the sort of user who'd never think to look up, download and install extensions for their web browser. If you're reading an article in Slashdot about a release candidate of a web browser right now, like you are, odds are you know at least the basics about phishing; what it is, how to detect it, and what you can do to avoid it. But little old miss Edna, who only uses the computer to pay her bills or read the church website doesn't know what phishiing is. And she doesn't know what the hell an extension is either, and sure as how isn't going to go out of her way to get an extension to protect her from phishing. Hopefully, having the protection built in will prevent people like this from getting their identities stolen.

Re:Bloat?

[pingveno]

I'm guessing many of the people who are easily taken in by a phishing scheme are not going to have the technical know-how to install an anti-phishing extension. Besides, *everyone* is going to want the phishing detector once it is available. As another guess, making something an extension probably adds a considerable amount of overhead.

Re:Bloat?

[Anonymous Coward]

So why not provide those extensions pre-installed? That'll take care of the problem you mentioned, as well as let people remove them if they don't need them.

Re:Bloat?

[pingveno]

How did you get your Linux system to do that trick? I usually have KDE, a few servers, and Firefox running without getting to 512 MB. The only explanation I can think of is that the Linux filesystems store a cache in RAM for quick access, the polar opposite of swapping to disk. That doesn't really count, though...

Re:Bloat?

[Itsacon]

I've been looking very hard at Opera.

Look no further, just download it. It has all the features Mozilla will be implementing in the next two years. Been that way for a while now.

I keep being amazed by these people who advocate Mozilla by naming stuff Opera had 5 years ago. Accept it, it's the better browser. But apparently people prefer using Netscape...

Re:Bloat?

[cheater512]

Use your computer a lot and/or leave it running for awhile and you'll notice that RAM usage keeps going up.

I just recently rebooted my computer but my server running Samba, Apache and a few other things says this:
Mem: 2059352k total, 1558132k used, 501220k free, 277372k buffers
Swap: 795208k total, 256k used, 794952k free, 685484k cached

As you can see its currently got nearly 700mb of ram used as disk cache.

Re:Bloat?

[init100]

I keep being amazed by these people who advocate Mozilla by naming stuff Opera had 5 years ago. Accept it, it's the better browser. But apparently people prefer using Netscape...

Maybe, just maybe, because Opera is closed-source.

Re:Bloat?

[RonnyJ]

I like the Opera implementation - it will use GNU Aspell if it's available (or the system spellchecker on Mac OS X).

http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/opera/spell check/

Re:Bloat?

[cg0def]

because the spell checker is about the coolest new addition that I have seen in a browser. It nice to see innovation constantly flowing out of an OSS project. Way to go Mozilla!

Re:Bloat?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if it is bloated, but, honestly, I read through the list of new features and not one was particularly interesting. YMMV, of course. So, if the resource use is higher, I'll certainly stick with the 1.x stream. Furthermore, if there is a way to easily strip out half those new features, that's a build I might find more interesting -- maybe a "FireFox Light" or "FireFerret" version.

Re:Bloat?

[Aqws]

Because they got tired of all the typos on Slashdot...

Re:Bloat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. We bought 2GB of RAM so our Vista machines will only run as slow as our old Win95/p133/16mb machines.

Re:Bloat?

[Neitokun]

I really wish i knew what you people are talking about with ANY firefox bloat. on my windows machine, with a bunch of tabs open, firefox is right now using a grand total of.... *drumroll please* 46 megs of ram. Not bad, in my opinion. Vidalia and TOR together use almost the same amount. Note to Windows users: To help firefox slim down, go to about:config and add config.trim_on_minimize true to the screen as a boolene value.

Re:Bloat?

[ClamIAm]

That might be part of the reason, but I think there are two other reasons that are at least as big: Firefox hype, and Opera's past policy of ads in the free version.

I think it is fair to say that Firefox has reached some value of "critical mass". Googling for browser marketshare returns statistics that generally show Opera having a tenth or less of the marketshare FF does. A lot of this probably has to do with the hype surrounding Firefox: it's a "new" browser, born from the ashes of Netscape, taking on the Gates Empire and bearing the aegis of Free Software/Open Source.

At first glance, Opera is kind of the other side of the coin here. They're not (as) new, they aren't connected to a once-great name, they're not Free/Open, and they look more like a "business". Of course, a lot of this is either not true or irrelevant. But then they also have the fact that the free (as in beer) version of their browser used to have wonderful banner ads. I think this last point is most important.

When Netscape started dying, people didn't have a lot of choice for browsers. There was Internet Explorer (cost: $0) and Opera (cost: annoying ads). I think that if Opera had had a non-ad, basic freeware version, they would probably have captured a lot of the people who now use Firefox. And the ad-version could very well hang over them in the minds of some people.

Re:Bloat?

[Frosty Piss]

If there is memory just sitting around doing nothing then why not use it?

Because when FF hogs all the memory, when I try to use something else, there's none for it? Maybe that's a good reason?

Re:Bloat?

[cheater512]

Are you sure about that? Do you know that it doesnt give up memory if something needs it?

Just because your using 100% of your memory doesnt mean that you have 0% free memory.

Re:Bloat?

[shellbeach]

If you like using aspell, then you can always use the AspellFox extension.

Re:Bloat?

[Espectr0]

Have these new features added additional bloat to the once-lean Firefox? I

Firefox (with that name) has never been lean. You must be speaking of phoenix.

Heck, firefox has more bloat than the mozilla suite's navigator component.

Re:Bloat?

[pipingguy]

It probably also breaks a lot of extensions that users have become used to. That's not the fault of the developers though.

good update

[Treates2]

i'm not too kean on the new theme but i like the features of this release..

Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RAM.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been using the x86 Linux release all day today. And unfortunately, it still feels slower than Opera. From my quick measurements, it also seems to use more RAM.

I had been hoping that Firefox 2 would be able to better compete with Opera. I was hoping that it would render faster, while also consuming far less memory. My Firefox 2 RC2 process from early this afternoon ended up hitting about 650 MB of RAM (measured with top) before I had to kill the process. And that was only after about three hours of use, in total. I didn't have any non-default extensions installed, so they aren't to blame.

My computer only has 512 MB of RAM, and I'm not in a position to purchase more. If Firefox 2 leads to my system thrashing after only several hours, then I don't think I'll be able to use it. Opera, on the other hand, only ever seems to ever consume 80 MB or so. I can't recall ever seeing it above 100 MB.

I really like the extensions of Firefox, many of which Opera does not offer. But Firefox suffers from some pretty severe memory management issues. Those in turn may lead to degraded system performance, even on computers with 512 MB of RAM, running Slackware 11. Unless Firefox deals with this excessive memory usage, I don't think I'll be able to use it on my system. Meanwhile, Opera functions without such problems, so I'll continue to use it until things improve with Firefox.

Wtf! Advertising on the download page?

[ubuwalker31]

Well, this is a new low for Mozilla: "Show your support for Mozilla! Get cool Firefox gear at the Mozilla Store."

I know that Mozilla has always encouraged people to buy stuff to support the project, but this blatent brand promotion is making me sick, especially due to the fact that linux distros can't even use the logos anymore.

Tweaked UI

[eebra82]

I've been running FireFox 2 since its first release, but I haven't noticed any changes to the UI as advertised. What's new compared to the older release candidate?

Re:Tweaked UI

[Matt Perry]

I've been running FireFox 2 since its first release, but I haven't noticed any changes to the UI as advertised.

The UI has changed compared to FF 1.5 not FF 2.0 RC1.

Re:Tweaked UI

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. The bookmarks toolbar on OS X got fixed, which was slightly messed up for RC1. That's at least what I noticed right off the bat.

Re:Tweaked UI

[R.Mo_Robert]

Unless I'm mistaken, I belive the interface was tweaked a bit (the Go button and stupid "drop down arrow" hover effects on the Back/Forward buttons seem a bit darker) on the Mac version (wouldn't surprise me if the Windows/Linux versions didn't change--RC 1 was at least decent for them), though it still looks terrible for a Mac app. For example, the toolbar icons increase in saturation when you hover over them. Note to theme devs: Mac icons don't do that; this isn't Windows XP. Plus, the whole toolbar is now this light gray instead of the OS X pinstripe background. It seriously looks like a poorly ported KDE app.

That being said, for Mac users who want a theme that actually looks decent, they should try the Gerich/Holander update of the original Pinstripe theme which they created for Firefox 1. Not only is it updated for Firefox 2, but it's been tweaked a bit and looks "20% more Macintosh" according to them--though more like 200% if you ask me: http://kmgerich.com/2006/09/27/pinstripe-for-firef ox-now-with-20-more-macintosh/

It's also available for Windows and Linux and will make Firefox look more or less like the 1.x theme.

Re:Tweaked UI

[Anonymous Coward]

The icons changed compared to 1.5.

The url and search bars are more crowded now, and we can't get rid of the mostly useless "Go" button. The icons are less cool, and the flat button style looks kind of odd.

One thing that I prefer in the Linux version is the placement of the orange bookmark icon in the status bar. In Windows it appears oddly within the url bar.

Re:Wtf! Advertising on the download page?

[rhavenn]

WTF are you smoking? Of course Linux distros can use the logo and the browser. Some distros however, *cough* Debian *cough* stick to an ideal a little to stringently.

pr0n protection

[macadamia_harold]

Resuming your browsing session: The Session Restore feature restores windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session.

Yeah, like I need my last open browser window coming back up on my screen. I "accidentally" kill the power strip when my boss walks in my cube for a reason.

Re:pr0n protection

[voice_of_all_reason]

I dunno, I'm really looking forward to this. I usually get home from work and pop up a bunch of message boards to catch up. It'd be alot easier to save this to check back tomorrow instead of making a half-dozen bookmarks every night. It would also help when I'm just plain lost in ebay pages when it's time to hit the sack and want to pick up where I left off the next day.

If you're worried about a nosy boss/kid/significant other, just power off/log off and use password protection. That be a significant enough barrier to prevent casual snooping.

Re:pr0n protection

[The MAZZTer]

In this scenario, when you run Firefox next it'll ask you if you want to restore the last session or not. Then you just click "no".

Re:pr0n protection

[arun_s]

Yeah, like I need my last open browser window coming back up on my screen.

Yes, its not very convenient if it automatically restores tabs from the last session, but if its anything like the SessionSaver extension, I'm all for it. Its incredibly useful in that it allows you to reopen closed tabs while browsing. Also, if you're researching a particular topic and have a dozen related tabs open that you'll need again in the future, you can save the entire session under a name.
Its nice to see the Firefox guys taking a cool thing like that and making it part of the default browser.

Re:pr0n protection

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, I'm really looking forward to this. I usually get home from work and pop up a bunch of message boards to catch up. It'd be alot easier to save this to check back tomorrow instead of making a half-dozen bookmarks every night. It would also help when I'm just plain lost in ebay pages when it's time to hit the sack and want to pick up where I left off the next day.

You can do this already using the TabMixPlus extension.

Re:pr0n protection

[Trogre]

Of course if you're browsing pornography at work you've got bigger problems than browser history.

Re:pr0n protection

[Anonymous Coward]

I use the Session Manager extension to do this, I used to use SessionSaver, but then read that it had a memory leak so I switched.

Re:pr0n protection

[Kelson]

It'd be alot easier to save this to check back tomorrow instead of making a half-dozen bookmarks every night. It would also help when I'm just plain lost in ebay pages when it's time to hit the sack and want to pick up where I left off the next day.

At least in Firefox 2, the session saving only kicks in if the browser closes unexpectedly (browser crash, power outage, etc.)

Re:pr0n protection

[IpalindromeI]

You don't have to wait. You can use this great functionality with FF 1.5 today!

Saving

1. Open a bunch of tabs you want to reopen later.
2. Click the Bookmark menu and choose the "Bookmark All Tabs" option.
3. When the dialog opens, name the bookmark folder that will hold them all. Maybe something like "Check These Later".

Reopening

1. Click the Bookmark menu to open it.
2. Move your mouse to the "Check These Later" folder you made earlier.
3. Right click and choose "Open in Tabs".
4. Alternatively, the folder entry will expand, displaying the contained bookmarks. The bottom entry will be "Open in Tabs".

Surprise me. Better than: Safari, IE, Opera, iCab

[Che Guevarra]

IE 7, Firefox...

Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I can tell, Firefox is losing users at an astounding rate.

Many people have stopped using it due to it's bloat and slowness. I installed in on my uncle's new desktop computer several months back. He asked if there was an alternative he could use, because he found it was consuming all of the physical memory in his system, and then some.

At the college where I work, a number of researchers, professors, and students had switched to Firefox over the past few years. I know at least ten who have switched to browsers like Opera, Konqueror, and some even back to Internet Explorer, unfortunately. Of the people I have directly inquired with, they basically said it wasn't comparable, in terms of speed or memory usage, with other browsers.

I know of several open source developers who have stopped using it because of the recent Debian nonsense. Debates aside, their handling of the situation had a very negative impact. Many developers have gained a dislike for the Mozilla project, and others have switched. Those developers I know are now using Konqueror. One of them is using Opera on Windows.

Myself, I have stopped using Firefox for the aforementioned reasons. Konqueror has proven to be a better browser. It works perfectly fine with all of the sites I visit, and doesn't use excessive amounts of memory. I use KDE, so it integrates with my desktop far better than Firefox did.

You may think that it's only 20 or so people I'm talking about here, and that we're not that important. I'd beg to differ. Each one of us has recommended the use of Firefox to our relatives, friends, colleagues, and other acquaintances. Many of them have stopped suggesting it. I personally don't recommend its use. I suggest Konqueror or Opera for Linux users, and Opera for Windows users. Mac OS X users these days seem to go straight to Safari. At least five of the people I know are now making similar recommendations to people they know.

The Mozilla project will need to put forth much in the way of effort to stop this. We'll need to see rapid technological improvements, as well as changes in the way the project is run. I don't know if we'll ever see such things happen, but at least we have alternative browsers to move to if things continue to get worse.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[bunratty]

From what I can tell, Firefox is losing users at an astounding rate.

Nope, Firefox is still gaining usage share at the rate of several percentage points per year.

What has gone up dramatically has been the amount of bad news people are making up about Firefox. Sorry, trying to make Firefox look bad hasn't worked in the past and it won't work now.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[skelator2821]

Dont feed the Trolls Please

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox works fine. It starts slowly, sure, but it always has. GUI responsiveness is perfect. Konqueror is no better. It's a lot worse. I'm not sure whether it's just the Kubuntu build of Konqueror, but everything loads/renders more slowly, the browser doesn't start much faster (if at all), and going back in browsing history isn't instant like Firefox. Not to mention all the ugly repainting Konqueror does...

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[phrasebook]

Firefox works fine.

Nah, it consumes a lot of memory and crashes occasionally. You don't need to lower your standards that far.

GUI responsiveness is perfect

Nope. Mozilla software is easily the slowest GUI software on any Linux desktop, save OpenOffice. It's more responsive on Windows (in the same way Java apps are more responsive on Windows), but still doesn't fit or feel or respond like a native app would.

Konqueror is no better.

Konqueror feels significantly faster. Crummy browser though.

The only thing Firefox has going for it is extensions. Extensions extensions extensions! For better or worse, this is a big enough feature to outweigh the general poor quality of the software.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[pembo13]

Rihgttt....you had to install Firefox for him, but hhe knows how much memory it's taking up. Go back to doing drugs.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[kruhft]

I almost gave up on firefox, but I gave it one last shot and attempted to build my own from CVS. After upgrading to gcc4 to eliminate the link errors that occure with previous versions, the build went smoothly with the following ~/.mozconfig:

. ~/data/mozilla/browser/config/mozconfig
ac_add_options --prefix=/usr/local/stow/firefox-cvs
ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-march=pentium4 -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math -mmmx -msse -msse2 -mfpmath=sse,387 -pipe -funsafe-math-optimizations"
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --enable-default-toolkit=gtk2
ac_add_options --enable-xft
ac_add_options --enable-freetype
ac_add_options --disable-postscript
ac_add_options --disable-gnomevfs
ac_add_options --disable-gnomeui
ac_add_options --with-pthreads
ac_add_options --disable-ldap
ac_add_options --disable-xprint

This config made a world of difference in the usability of firefox, and I'm sure the main speedups are from using the native gtk2 toolkit rather than chrome/xul. For those that aree unhappy with the slowness of the default builds, I suggest trying something like this; it makes a world of difference.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[aiken_d]

I have a stock firefox install with no extensions, and it routinely consumes up to 2GB of memory (on a 4GB system) before I notice things grinding to a halt, and I kill the process and start a new browser. A day or two later, it's back up to 2GB of memory usage, with maybe 4-6 tabs going.

But I suppose my experience isn't valid, since I'm just "trying to make firefox look bad" because I've got nothing better to do with my time, eh?

Thing is, one of the reasons I (like so many other people) was so anxious to switch off of IE was Microsoft's arrogance and disdain for their users. Unfortunately for all of us, the "you become what you fight" principle seems to be in effect here. I still use firefox because it's the best overall browser, when it works. But the fanboys who engage in personal attacks on anyone who runs into difficulty sure don't help the browser's image.

-b

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[Telvin_3d]

A day or two later

By the above, I assume that you are implying that you leave Firefox open continuously for days at a time?

I know of few programs on the same level of complexity as Firefox that wouldn't have some memory issues after multiple days of active use.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[bunratty]

Sorry, I wasn't engaging in "personal attacks on anyone who runs into difficulty." I pointed out the poster was fabricating an obviously untrue report about the number of Firefox users decreasing. I have noticed many other people fabricating other bad news about Firefox (such as the recent hoax about security problems), and often the "bad news" can easily be proven untrue.

As for your genuine memory problem, I'm sorry to head about it. I use Firefox for days at a time, and memory use stays at around 100 MB for me. If you want something done about the problem you're having, you'll have to give enough information that other people can see the bug on their own machine (as easily as possible). Simply saying you see the problem after a day or two of use doesn't help, because most people see memory usage stay low, even when running Firefox continually for days.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[ozmanjusri]

I have a stock firefox install with no extensions, and it routinely consumes up to 2GB of memory

I keep reading about Firefox memory consumption, but I've never seen it on any of the computers I use or support (a mix of Linux flavours and XP). My main computer's a dual boot laptop with 512MB, at the moment running XP. Firefox is using about 58MB after about three days of use, including several Fark visits and Photoshop comps.

Is there something about your install of XP or Firefox that's non-standard?

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[aiken_d]

Are you really saying that it's unreasonable to expect firefox to be stable for more than a couple of days? I've been told it's my fault for visiting the "wrong" websites, or clicking links while it's still loading, or for using the back button, or even for pointing it at a web server running on localhost (!). But a built-in time limit is a new one.

In your opinion, how often should one expect to restart a browser, given its apparenty unique level of complexity? And, just out of curioisity, why does this apply to browsers but not operating systems, databases, or kitchen-sink bloatware like MS Word? All of which crash sometimes, of course, but nobody's ever told me it was unreasonable to expect more than a day or to of usage out of any of them.

-b

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[Anonymous Coward]

It has seriously gone down in quality as of late, so this is of no surprise to me at all. It crashes quite often and has a really buggy feel to it has steadily became less reliable, especially the last six months or so, on several computers, not this RC2 but, the regular release with updates...

It used to be Firefox, was good and solid, but it was really much better before all of these updates that added no new features other than "security" problems that I personally could care less about amd added no new functionality...it's better to assume everything you do on the internet will be broadcast on NBC Nightly News, than assume "security fixes" will protect you...it is however, safe to assume that "security fixes" will make the software more buggy, as they are often done in a hurry, and never tested enough...

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[hugzz]

For what it's worth, I've also switched to Opera after being a fan of Firefox

Firefox may still be gaining a lot of users (from IE I imagine), but I suspect that it is also starting to lose a number of its old users to Opera. Becasue the IE user base is much larger than that of Firefox, it has a larger affect on the numbers when a percentage of IE users move to Firefox than it does when a percentage of Firefox users move to Opera.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[Anonymous Coward]

No one has caught this troll so far?

An uncle who does not know how to install FF knows enough to know it hogs too much physical memory?

Konqueror is nowhere close to FF usability. You know several who have stopped using it? I know a lot, a lot, who have recently migrated to it from IE (some of my dumb friends), from Opera (some of my geek friends, reluctantly, but finally), and some from Konquerer.

Stop loading all the extensions to FF, and it will not be a memory problem. And please, somebody mark this a troll.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[julesh]

I know of few programs on the same level of complexity as Firefox that wouldn't have some memory issues after multiple days of active use.

Internet Explorer. Opera. Konqueror. None of these have similar issues, in my experience.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[julesh]

It is the weirdest thing. There's nothing remotely unusual about the systems this happens on. A friend of mine has the problems on his machine, whereas I don't on mine. I've looked very carefully trying to figure out the difference between the two machines. We both have long-running Firefox processes that are hibernated on a regular basis. We both actively use tabs, opening a tab to read an article and closing it immediately afterwards. We're running the same version of firefox, with the same versions of the same extensions. Yet for some reason the memory usage on his machine seems to grow fairly consistently and quickly (taking ~2-3 days to reach the point of unusability), whereas mine takes much longer to become a problem (uptimes of 2 weeks aren't rare for me).

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[Anonymous Coward]

You have 1GB or less ram, he has more. Theres a really BAD alg. for determining how much RAM FF uses (internally) once your break the 1GB mark or so.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[kjart]

I know of few programs on the same level of complexity as Firefox that wouldn't have some memory issues after multiple days of active use.

I leave Outlook 2007 (beta version) open for days and/or weeks at a time and don't run into problems as severe as what he is describing. Also, since when is a web browser a benchmark for complexity?

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[smitingpurpleemu]

Except some of the complaints (excessive memory and CPU usage, adding bloat to what was once lean) are actually valid? The novelty will wear off sooner or later and because it does not hold a monopoly, Firefox will actually have to deal with these problems to survive. Sticking your head in the sand does no good for Firefox.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[shutdown -p now]

-march=pentium4 -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math -mmmx -msse -msse2 -mfpmath=sse,387 -pipe -funsafe-math-optimizations

What, no -funroll-loops?

This config made a world of difference in the usability of firefox, and I'm sure the main speedups are from using the native gtk2 toolkit rather than chrome/xul

You cannot really get rid of XUL in Firefox. It's written in XUL. What you did was to tell it to use GTK2 widgets (GTK1 is another option), which is what it usually does anyway.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[cerberusss]

I definitely agree with you that it's reasonable to expect firefox to be stable. I can think of one difference between your buddy's PC and yours, though: the browser history. Maybe if you have some spare time, you could look at a weblog entry from David Baron and see if you can make the problem occur somewhere else.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[arpy]

it routinely consumes up to 2GB of memory (on a 4GB system) before I notice things grinding to a halt, and I kill the process and start a new browser. A day or two later, it's back up to 2GB of memory usage, with maybe 4-6 tabs going ... But I suppose my experience isn't valid, since I'm just "trying to make firefox look bad" because I've got nothing better to do with my time, eh?

Well I dunno about that -- but, for example, I've had a different experience: I regularly use Firefox on a few different systems, some of which run Linux, some that run Windows 98 and some that run Windows XP and they all have less than a gig of memory. My home system is running Windows XP at the moment and only has 512MB of physical RAM and I haven't had your problem. This is despite running some sizeable apps like Photoshop at the same time. This isn't to say that I doubt your experience, just that other people may doubt it because they obviously have vastly more satifactory Firefox performance than you.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[Anonymous Coward]

I see this posted all the time on Slashdot and Digg (and pretty much nowhere else) but I've never seen memory usage get very bad, or performance suffer. I even sometimes run nightly builds of Firefox, which I would expect to have problems such as that. Either for some reason my setup is completely awesome and always avoids these problems, which I doubt since I experience problems with other software sometimes, or there's something wrong with your install in some way.

I leave Firefox open all day, browsing different sites, ranging from a small number of tabs to a large number, and usually have at least a couple of windows open. I even have it open all day at work while running generally two copies of Visual Studio 2005 (which does use up heaps of memory), a few instances of SQL Server Management tools, a PocketPC 2003 emulator, various other development tools, Office Outlook, and iTunes, and I have absolutely no problems with memory usage at any point of the day. That machine has 1GB RAM.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[cortana]

You missed -fomit-instructions.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your usage patterns are obviously not typical.

Virtually nobody has Firefox (or any web browser) running for days at a time without being restarted. In fact, hardly anybody has their PCs running for days at a time without being restarted, hibernation is virtually never used except on laptops (and even then, only be real geeks), and most people don't use sleep mode either.

When normal people are done with their browser, they shut it down. When they're finished working on a document, they close the word processor. When they've done with their PCs, they shut them down. Only weirdos keep software running when they aren't using it.

Unless you write software in a language like Java that uses a compacting garbage collector, memory usage is pretty much inevitably going to increase in all programs that use dynamic memory allocation.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[julesh]

Nope, we both have less. I have 384, he has 320.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[Eravnrekaree]

The memory usage of Firefox is indeed a problem. I dont think, or I doubt, that this has anything at all to do with its features, but perhaps caching of data, the way it handles data. The way the firefox process grows in size seems to indicate it has memory leaks and allocation issues. I dont think features should be blamed for this.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[kruhft]

-funroll-loops comes default with -O2 and above I'm pretty sure.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[kruhft]

> You missed -fomit-instructions.

Not sure what it does, and I can't find it in the docs or through a quick google. I *do* know what the others do, so I'm ok with using them, although I'm sure that and option wouldn't break code that much. Any explanations on what it does and how much of a speedup it might give?

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[kruhft]

A joke? Possibly. gcc4 doesn't support this option anyways ;-) /me just starts drinking his coffee.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[kruhft]

> You cannot really get rid of XUL in Firefox. It's written in XUL. What you
> did was to tell it to use GTK2 widgets (GTK1 is another option), which is
> what it usually does anyway.

But doesn't Firefox usually use a portable widget set drawn using the canvas elements?
I thought they wrote thier own toolkit this way for portability and that this would
specify that you could use a native toolkit. The look of the program changed when I
  made this change; but that's could just be the gtk -> gtk2 transition. It's way faster
now anyways, so I'm not complaining ;-)

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[beermad]

Funny. Looking at the server logs on my distinctly non-techy website, average Firefox use has increased by about 50% since January. Whereas IE use has gone down from about 84% to 76%, with other browsers pretty much un-changed.

Hardly a haemorrhage.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[cyberformer]

People switching to Opera (or Konqueror) isn't a bad thing. We're all better off if there is a diversity of browsers than if a single company is able to control the market and dictate the standards. Everyone using Firefox would be better than everyone using IE (because Firefox is open-source, more secure and more customizable) but not as good as some actual competition.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Mozilla Seamonkey (community driven continuation of the Moz Suite) and usually have it running for days at a time, sometimes longer than a week, with three or more tabs open. I have never seen Seamonkey use that kind of memory. Right now I have three tabs open and it is using 90 MBs. If you're sick of Firefox I recommend giving Seamonkey a chance, it really isn't as bloated as everyone claims it to be.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[SanityInAnarchy]

I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Burden is on you to RTFM if you want to claim it does.

Loop unrolling is not always a good thing. It reduces the sheer number of instructions to be performed, but at the expense of memory. Using more memory means more cache misses.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about what it would mean to omit instructions. If you can't figure it out, WTF are you doing fucking around with compiler options??

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[Dave2 Wickham]

What the OP really needs is the Gentoo Optimisations Generator.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[kruhft]

I check gcc's manual, and no, it doesn't look like any -O* setting enables loop unrolling by default (probably because modern processors don't need it as much as before with branch prediction, plus, as you say, it saves code cache). I guess I must have read that before or thought I had in the past; my mistake.

And still ...

[isometrick]

... no correct ACID2, and no support for SVG images in CSS.

Everybody else (besides IE, of course) supports the first, and I'd love Firefox to be the first to support the second.

Just my $0.02, I'm sure everybody's got their own pet RFEs and bugs.

Re:And still ...

[Matt Perry]

... no correct ACID2

It's already known that Acid 2 support won't be in the Gecko 1.8 (Firefox 2) branch because of large changes that need to be made. It's supported in Gecko 1.9 (Firefox 3). Get a trunk build if you're interested.

Re:And still ...

[BZ]

Actually, getting a trunk build won't help... yet. Now if you get a reflow branch build...

See http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nig htly/experimental/reflow-refactor/latest-trunk/

Re:And still ...

[HeroreV]

Firefox uses Gecko as it's layout engine. Since Firefox 2.0 and Firefox 1.5 both use a version of Gecko from the 1.8 branch, it's of course not going to render Acid 2 differently or handle SVG differently.

The difference between Gecko and Trident (the layout engine for IE) is that there is an active effort to get Gecko to pass Acid 2 while Microsoft has made it clear that they aren't going to try at all.There's already a branch of Gecko that passes Acid 2.

Re:And still ...

[Eravnrekaree]

I would like to see more support of technologies such as SVG, SMIL, CSS3, DOM, and so on as well. I would also like to see features such as MNG support added, which is helpful in doing animated images. I wonder if they there has been any talk of implementing a portable fonts system in firefox such as open type so, if a font is not installed locally on the system, it is downloaded from the web site and used by the web browser to display the font.

These kinds of features, to provide a high degree of control and visual effects, while ridiculed by some, is actually necessary to fend off proprietary software like Flash and its proprietary formats. Obviously there was a need for the sort of thing Flash does, since there was no open source solution, we ended up with this situation where flash has become pandemic on the web, and you must download a proprietary closed source viewer that wont run on many OSs just to view a web page.

I do not think that adding new features are a bad thing necessarily as far as features and performance is concerned, relatively speaking. I think people incorrectly blame the features on the high memory usage of firefox, but I suspect this has nothing to do with features but poor data handling practices , in the handling of data from web page. This is indicated in the way that firefox starts out small, but as you load more pages, tends to expand and increase in size quite significantly.

Re:Surprise me. Better than: Safari, IE, Opera, iC

[Che Guevarra]

This was meant to be a flame/troll.... Tell me what's better...

Re:Wtf! Advertising on the download page?

[zullnero]

You're kidding, right? Mozilla incorporated a long time ago. It helps to fund the ongoing development and maintenance of its products by selling merchandise. It has been doing so for years now. Someone mod this guy up for funny.

Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[joe_n_bloe]

{Java/ECMA}Script keeps getting better and better. I'll be happy to bet that by the time Perl 6 is actually "released," and "working" (in the sense that Perl 5.6.1 was working and Perl 5.6.0 was not), JavaScript will be cooler, faster, and more useful.

I want JavaScript + a Mozilla-like UI that will let me write full-featured locally-hosted GUI apps that can do all the things other local languages can ... read/write local files, and so on.

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

Javascript in Firefox 2.0 is about 50% slower than in Firefox 1.5.

Try both in this MSX emulation in javascript and see the difference:
http://jsmsxdemo.googlepages.com/jsmsx.html

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[joe_n_bloe]

Try both in this MSX emulation in javascript and see the difference:
http://jsmsxdemo.googlepages.com/jsmsx.html

The "emulating ancient computer hardware" JavaScript benchmark is exactly the one I'm interested in.

(Not.)

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[insert_username_here]

Check out XUL here (Mozilla's XUL project page) and here.

I've done some experimenting with XUL, and I've actually found it to be an incredibly powerful (but rarely used) platform. The biggest problem when I used it was that the only way you could actually "get stuff done" was via XPCOM, which is a rather clunky interface from JS to C++. If they were to make XPCOM components much easier to write and install (and maybe add seamless support for languages like Java and Python - I wouldn't be surprised if this has already happened, actually), it'd be unstoppable (apart from the fact that you need to have Gecko installed before you can use it).

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[MrNaz]

You'll never have it. At least I hope you won't. JavaScript is intended to be a locally run but sandboxed language. I don't EVER want JS to be working with local files or devices without some serious security models put in place to prevent web sites from doing nasty things without my knowledge. If you want a server supplied, client side executing app framework, Java is supposed to be just that. Jokes about Java aside, it is the closest you'll get to full local app flexibility "embedded" in a web page.

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

I want JavaScript + a Mozilla-like UI that will let me write full-featured locally-hosted GUI apps that can do all the things other local languages can ... read/write local files, and so on.

And hackers everywhere thank you for your input!

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[novus ordo]

I noticed that 2.0 has a lot better Ajax support. I'm surprised nobody mentioned it since /. has some Ajax support and the "floating thingy" has been bothering me for a while when scrolling down. Also the spelling is nice and I'm sure it will become as annoying as well. On a side note, I have discovered that I have been spelling surprised wrong for years and that thingy is not a word. Yay!(also not a word)

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[pile0nades]

I just tried it in Firefox 2.0RC2, Opera 9.02, and IE, and Firefox was the fastest.

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

I know -- apples are sooo much better than oranges!

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[mochan_s]

He probably means like IE's HTA ( which has been stagnant for years and years and years).

It's a sore sore missing feature in Mozilla. There is XUL but seems be a major pain to run it.

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[mochan_s]

HTA has been able to do that forever.

I think maybe firefox has XUL but it's a pain?

I sorely wish there was something like HTA for firefox.

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[bunratty]

Javascript in Firefox 2.0 is about 50% slower than in Firefox 1.5.

Browser speed comparisons shows Firefox 2 script execution speed to be at most 5-10% slower than Firefox 1.5. More fabricated bad news about Firefox?

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[pile0nades]

Did you miss the part about "locally hosted"? Meaning not on a website.

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[HeroreV]

You'll never have it.

Stop spewing bullshit. It already exists.

JavaScript is intended to be a locally run but sandboxed language. I don't EVER want JS to be working with local files or devices without some serious security models put in place to prevent web sites from doing nasty things without my knowledge.

Firefox uses JavaScript to work with local files and devices. Do you not want Firefox? XUL files can be loaded in the browser that have just as much power as Firefox, and all they require is for the user to say OK to a dialog box.

Steps to total pwnage of most Windows boxes:
1. Create XUL page.
2. Upload XUL page onto the web.
3. Put out links to the XUL page.
4. Hope people follow the links.
5. Hope they say OK to the dialog box.
6. pwnage!

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[jesser]

XUL pages don't have any privileges (or abilities to toss up dialogs that request privileges) that HTML pages don't have, unless I'm missing something. Do you have a demo?

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[MrNaz]

The Mozilla framework is not "web based", it's a local application framework that just happens to have had a web browser made out of it. XUL apps aren't any more web based than a Java applet.

It's a fine line between web based and web served, but if you can't see that line and don't understand it, then please refrain from referring to others' comments as "bullshit".

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[Eivind Eklund]

Try Ruby. It's got an object model that can function like JavaScript's, and it is a cleaner language than Perl 6. It's sort of a fixed Perl and JavaScript, while also picking the good from a ton of other languages, and keeping the result simple and clean.

There's a couple of minor annoyances with it, of course, like with everything - but overall, it's clearly the most pleasant language I've programmed in.

Eivind.

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[fatphil]

Cold Start: 12.49 vs. 9.64 = 30% slower
Warm Start: 5.89 vs. 3.95 = 49% slower

What different meaning of "at most" do you have from the rest of the world?

Both OSX and Windows showed >10% slowdowns in some tests.

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[bunratty]

You're looking at startup time, not script execution speed. Please be careful to read the posts to see what we're discussing before jumping in with an irrelevant observation.

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[fatphil]

Accepted. My reading of the thread was highly non-linear.

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[Petrushka]

... I have to say, "5-10% slower than Firefox 1.5" is not exactly good news.

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know which aspects of javascript they focused their comparison on to obtain this 5-10% slower result.

What I know is that when I run the above MSX emulator on Firefox 1.5, my computer needs 13 seconds to reach the interrupt 75, and when I run it on Firefox 2.0 RC2, my computer needs 19 seconds to reach the same interrupt value. 19/13 = 1.46 = 46% slower. Please have a try yourself and show me your numbers. (indeed, it would be interesting to point this out to some gecko developer and see what they have to say about it)

Therefore, I think that 50% slower is a reasonable magnitude. The difference probably stems from the fact the the emulator focus on tight loops, simple arithmetic manipulation and array accesses, while your number focus on some other aspect, such as DOM access. But I'm accepting a compromise, let's say FF 2.0 javascript is 33% slower than FF 1.5's.

Of course, both FF 1.5 and 2.0 are still faster than Opera, IE, Safari etc on the above emulation.

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[BZ]

The time in that testcase is dominated by garbage collection. I don't know what the page is doing that leads to so many temporary objects... In any case, marking for GC is somewhat slower in some cases in Gecko 1.8.1 than in Gecko 1.8, because a number of memory leaks due to reference cycles going through JS were fixed by hooking into marking.

In any case, I'm not seeing a 50% slowdown here; more like 10%....

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[HeroreV]

XUL pages don't have any privileges ... that HTML pages don't have

That's true. Any HTML document can do just as much as a XUL document can. I've actually created blank HTML pages that edit a few local text files when opened since I knew how to solve the problem in XPCOM.

XUL pages don't have ... abilities to toss up dialogs that request privileges

I looked it up and it turns out that only pages that are signed or stored locally can do it. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to get something signed though. Admittedly this is quite a bit different from what I claimed before, but a local file (XUL or HTML) will do it.

Do you have a demo?

Sure. Just paste this into a text file, remove the spaces Slashdot added, and save it as "something.html".

<html>
  <head>
    <title>XPCOM From Local HTML</title>
    <script>
netscape.security.PrivilegeManager.enabl ePrivilege("UniversalXPConnect");
var directory = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/file/local;1"].cr eateInstance();
directory.QueryInterface(Componen ts.interfaces.nsILocalFile);
directory.initWithPa th("C:\\Documents and Settings"); //change to whatever
var entries = directory.directoryEntries;
var paths = [];
while(entries.hasMoreElements()) {
  var entry = entries.getNext();
  entry.QueryInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIFile );
  paths.push(entry.path);
}
function onload() {
  document.getElementsByTagName("pre")[0].innerHTML = paths.join("\n");
}
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <pre></pre>
  </body>
</html>

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Neil Hodges]

I've been using Firefox 2.0 since beta one, and I agree with you; it is definitely heavier. Though, the Firefox 3 alpha is not much better.

DSM-IV 302.83

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of you still running IE who are ready to treat or cure your disease, the direct download page is here. For those of you who want to feed your masochistic disorder, this might be more appropriate.

Re:Surprise me. Better than: Safari, IE, Opera, iC

[BobNET]

The Libwww Line Mode Browser

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[joe_n_bloe]

Right, I use Opera when I need a browser that looks weird and can't handle JavaScript and CSS but does it all really fast.

Still missing?

[NoMaster]

So, still no roaming profiles, or even bookmarks sharing?

(No, the bookmark sync extensions don't cut it...)

Re:Still missing?

[ragefan]

This is the sorta thing that should be in an extension! Exactly how often do most people REALLY need to share to bookmarks? Most of the *features* being added to Firefox2 already were extenions and probably should be left that way. If they want to include them, make them default extensions that can be unloaded if not needed or used.

What I like about Firefox is that I can have it setup completely different at work and at home. Being able to have different extenions for different styles of usage is an asset to the application. Otherwise Firefox is going to come full-circle and become the very thing that spawned its existance.

Re:Still missing?

[PurifyYourMind]

Would this help? http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_firefox/

Re:Still missing?

[HeroreV]

Mozilla Application Suite had a mail client, HTML WYSIWYG editor, an IRC client, and a bunch of other stuff. As long as the additions to Firefox all have something to do with browsing the web it'll never become like Mozilla Application Suite.

Re:Still missing?

[XMyth]

Have you tried Google Browser Sync? I love it

Re:Still missing?

[NoMaster]

This is the sorta thing that should be in an extension!

Agreed, but it aint. There are bookmark sync extensions (e.g. Bookmark Sync & Sort), but they're (a) flakey, and (b) only share bookmarks, not other profile information.

Portable Firefox isn't really a solution - I have 2 machines here, a Mac and a PC, with a browser running on both pretty much constantly. I also occasionally use a laptop out and about. I want to be able to share bookmarks between these three, seamlessly and concurrently. Sharing other profile information would be nice too, but isn't essential for me - however, it is a big selling point for large corporate use.

I also don't want to use 3rd-party bookmark repositories or, God forbid, something like del.icio.us. I have private data there that I'd like to keep private - at least if I control the repository server I have some measure of control over its security, and don't have to worry about Uzbekistani hackers breaking in or the server owner deciding to "monetise" his "asset" (i.e. my data)...

Really, the root of the problem is the abortion of a "database" that the Mozilla bookmarks are stored in. JWZ had a nice rant about this years back. Supposedly the Mozilla organisation have plans to replace this with a real lightweight DB, which would make bookmark and profile abstraction a lot easier, but there's no signs of it actually happening yet...

Re:Still missing?

[init100]

Have you tried Google Browser Sync? I love it

What about security? I understand that it can handle saved passwords (and possibly certificates as well). Will Google have access to those, or are they sent in encrypted form so that they remain unavailable to Google?

Until such questions are cleared up, Google Browser Sync is out of question.

Re:Still missing?

[cortana]

The bookmarks aren't stored in a database, they live in a bookmarks.html file. You're thinking of the history.

The present history and bookmarks code was originally going to be replaced by an sqllite database in Firefox 2, but they decided to push it back to Firefox 3 in order to get Firefox 2 out earlier.

Re:Still missing?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Assuming you can trust Google not to be lying, Google Browser Sync will do what you want. It won't store them on a server under your control, but it will encrypt them before they ever hit Google. Syncs bookmarks, passwords, and history.

Re:Still missing?

[XMyth]

Their stance is that what you select to encrypt will be encrypted and they don't have access to it. It is encrypted with your PIN (not PW to your google account) which Google says they don't send to the server.

Also, you can optionally NOT sync your saved passwords or form information, etc...

Sounds like you haven't even tried it, or looked into it. That's fine...but you do have some misconceptions.

Re:Still missing?

[init100]

Sounds like you haven't even tried it, or looked into it. That's fine...but you do have some misconceptions.

Actually, I looked into it after I posted, since I was curious. Most of it was cleared up, but I'd still like to know what encryption is used. And by the way it only runs in Firefox 1.5, while I'm still using 1.0 on my laptop (Fedora Core 4) even though that might not be for very long. FC6 is due for release any day.

Re:Wtf! Advertising on the download page?

[joe_n_bloe]

The good old free ride. Takes me back to the days when domain registration was free and UUNET was a non-profit. (Does anyone remember UUNET?)

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Denyer]

What extensions are you using, and do you experience the same memory chewing without them?

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Fnkmaster]

On the Windows build, the exact opposite seems to be true. The 2.0RC1 build seems to eat up far less RAM in intense browsing sessions than the 1.5.x series did. Much, much, less. Especially on very image intensive sites, that used to cause Firefox to gobble up memory until it usually died after a short period of time (uhhh, I won't explain what kind of "image intensive sites" I'm talking about here, you can figure it out I'm sure). :)

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[bunratty]

My Firefox 2 RC2 process from early this afternoon ended up hitting about 650 MB of RAM

If you can find steps to reliably reproduce any memory problem in Firefox 2 RC2, please go to MozillaZine and give them the information about how to see the problem. Someone will make sure the bug is reported in the bug database so it can be fixed.

Re:Wtf! Advertising on the download page?

[MrNaz]

You must be American. How else can your unwillingness to stick to core values be explained? *cough* what constitution? *cough*

Re:Wtf! Advertising on the download page?

[MrNaz]

You mean WorldCom? :P

least favorite feature..the arrows on the tab bar

[buswolley]

The only new feature I'd like to turn off is the change in how tabs are displayed after 13 tabs have been opened. I don't like having to scroll. I like them to be all in front of me.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[aichpvee]

Does it matter? Stock Firefox needs at least half a dozen extensions just to get the basic functionality it should come with by default.

And for the record, close button on tabs (or even the single one on the tab bar that Firefox has been shipping with) is a needless waste of space. When I ran the Firefox2 Beta I didn't even see an option to turn it off, and there definitely wasn't one built into Firefox 1.x.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I've never had Firefox use more than a 100MB RAM, no matter what I did -- dozens of tabs open, leaving it open for days, etc. I think a big part of the problem is reproducibility in the case of real memory leaks, and then leaks caused by extensions, or users mistaking things as leaks that aren't. At any rate, I figure I have 640MB RAM for a reason, and that's not for it to sit around unused. Unless Firefox steals the memory and keeps other applications from using it, is there really a problem? I've never experienced the hundreds and hundreds of MB RAM usage people talk about, but does it cause actual slowdowns?

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[bunratty]

Does it matter? Stock Firefox needs at least half a dozen extensions just to get the basic functionality it should come with by default.

Yes, it does matter. Certain extensions have severe memory leaks. If you simply stay away from the few bad extensions, you shouldn't see outrageous memory use. If you do, please report the steps you can follow to see the problem so it can be fixed.

Re:least favorite feature..the arrows on the tab b

[Trogre]

The tabs might not need to scroll if they had more display space, say the amount wasted by an extra Close button on every single tab.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Shining Celebi]

Stock Firefox needs at least half a dozen extensions just to get the basic functionality it should come with by default.

And then people whine about unnecessary bloat. ;)

I agree with you to a certain extent, though (I would argue Firefox comes with more features out of the box than many other browsers to begin with, though), and it seems to me like the problem is getting worse. For example, in 2.0, the option to disable third-party cookies is removed. You'll now have to either install an extension or muck through about:config, neither of which are terribly great ideas to me.

And for the record, close button on tabs (or even the single one on the tab bar that Firefox has been shipping with) is a needless waste of space. When I ran the Firefox2 Beta I didn't even see an option to turn it off, and there definitely wasn't one built into Firefox 1.x.

Here's your option. It's squirreled away in about:config, but oh well.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Anonymous Coward]

Please! The day that the Mozilla folks give a rat's ass about what the little people want, well... You know? This memory issue has been around for what? A MILLION YEARS?

Re:least favorite feature..the arrows on the tab b

[PurifyYourMind]

Amen. I liked the old method much better. No need to hunt for a close button; it was consistent and, as you say, took up less space. I agree with the GPP that the tab overflow is poorly done. For example, it's not intuitive that mousing over the tab bar and using the mouse scroll wheel will scroll the tabs (it will, but I only learned this after reading a mozillazine.org thread).

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[pile0nades]

My Firefox on WinXP has been open about 8 hours and is using only 129 MB so far. I have 16 extensions loaded right now. Generated: Sat Oct 07 2006 00:57:46 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time) User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061004 BonEcho/2.0 Build ID: 2006100403 Enabled Extensions: [16] - All-in-One Sidebar 0.7 RC 4: http://firefox.exxile.net/aios/ - ChatZilla 0.9.75: http://chatzilla.hacksrus.com/ - CoLT 2.2.1: http://www.borngeek.com/firefox/colt/ - Console 0.3.6: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3181 02 - DOM Inspector 1.8.1: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/inspector/ - FoxyTunes 2.0.2.1: http://www.foxytunes.com/ - Gmail Manager 0.5.3: http://www.longfocus.com/firefox/gmanager/ - Greasemonkey 0.6.5.20060727: http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/ - MR Tech Local Install 5.3: http://www.mrtech.com/extensions/local_install/ - Saved From URL 1.2: http://www.google.com/search?q=Bon%20Echo%20Saved% 20From%20URL - Stylish 0.4: http://userstyles.org/stylish/ - Tab Mix Plus 0.3.0.61001: http://tmp.garyr.net/ - Talkback 2.0: http://talkback.mozilla.org/ - Update Channel Selector 1.0.1: http://users.blueprintit.co.uk/~dave/web/firefox/u pdatechannel/index.html - userChrome.js 0.7: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3977 35 - XPather 1.0.1: http://xpath.alephzarro.com/ Disabled Extensions: [1] - Free Download Manager plugin 1.0: http://freedownloadmanager.org/ Total Extensions: 17 Installed Themes: [3] - Firefox (default): http://www.mozilla.org/ - Halloween 1.9.5: http://edhume.googlepages.com/home - QuBranch 1.0.20060929: http://www.schrade.com/firefox/themes/ Installed Plugins: (10) - Java(TM) 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 Update 8 - Microsoft® DRM - Mozilla Default Plug-in - OpenOffice.org Plug-in - QuickTime Plug-in 7.1 - RealPlayer Version Plugin - RealPlayer(tm) G2 LiveConnect-Enabled Plug-In (32-bit) - Shockwave Flash - Shockwave for Director - Windows Media Player Plug-in Dynamic Link Library

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[pile0nades]

^^(Shit, wrong formatting!)

My Firefox on WinXP has been open about 8 hours and is using only 129 MB so far. I have 16 extensions loaded right now.

Generated: Sat Oct 07 2006 00:57:46 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061004 BonEcho/2.0
Build ID: 2006100403

Enabled Extensions: [16]
- All-in-One Sidebar 0.7 RC 4: http://firefox.exxile.net/aios/
- ChatZilla 0.9.75: http://chatzilla.hacksrus.com/
- CoLT 2.2.1: http://www.borngeek.com/firefox/colt/
- Console 0.3.6: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3181 02
- DOM Inspector 1.8.1: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/inspector/
- FoxyTunes 2.0.2.1: http://www.foxytunes.com/
- Gmail Manager 0.5.3: http://www.longfocus.com/firefox/gmanager/
- Greasemonkey 0.6.5.20060727: http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/
- MR Tech Local Install 5.3: http://www.mrtech.com/extensions/local_install/
- Saved From URL 1.2: http://www.google.com/search?q=Bon%20Echo%20Saved% 20From%20URL
- Stylish 0.4: http://userstyles.org/stylish/
- Tab Mix Plus 0.3.0.61001: http://tmp.garyr.net/
- Talkback 2.0: http://talkback.mozilla.org/
- Update Channel Selector 1.0.1: http://users.blueprintit.co.uk/~dave/web/firefox/u pdatechannel/index.html
- userChrome.js 0.7: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3977 35
- XPather 1.0.1: http://xpath.alephzarro.com/

Disabled Extensions: [1]
- Free Download Manager plugin 1.0: http://freedownloadmanager.org/

Total Extensions: 17

Installed Themes: [3]
- Firefox (default): http://www.mozilla.org/
- Halloween 1.9.5: http://edhume.googlepages.com/home
- QuBranch 1.0.20060929: http://www.schrade.com/firefox/themes/

Installed Plugins: (10)
- Java(TM) 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 Update 8
- Microsoft® DRM
- Mozilla Default Plug-in
- OpenOffice.org Plug-in
- QuickTime Plug-in 7.1
- RealPlayer Version Plugin
- RealPlayer(tm) G2 LiveConnect-Enabled Plug-In (32-bit)
- Shockwave Flash
- Shockwave for Director
- Windows Media Player Plug-in Dynamic Link Library

The real question...

[anothernumber]

Have all the bugs reported from RC1 been implement into RC2?

Re:The real question...

[julesh]

Heh. That's a good one. Bugs reported for RC1 implemented in RC2.

There are bugs still in there that were first reported in 1999.

Re:The real question...

[Anonymous Coward]

For those who don't get it, Microsoft accidentally stated yesterday on their Vista RC2 page that the bugs in RC1 had been implemented in RC2.

Any chance they've fixed

[rsilvergun]

the vlc client plugin crashing FF every chance it gets? I think this might be one of those finger pointed issues (i.e. Mozilla saying it's a vlc problem and the vlc team saying it's a FF problem). I'd just like to see it fixed :(.

Re:Any chance they've fixed

[spacefrog]

YMMV, I'm still running 2.0b2 on Ubuntu Edgy. A majority of my ffx crashing with the VLC plugin went away with the latest and greatest VLC packages. Seems like the VLC packages were getting updated every day for a while, and it got worse a few times before it got better, but it seems quite stable now.

Stable enough that I can watch CNN pipeline and switch streams with impunity. Prior to about five or six days ago, switching streams seemed to bomb ffx about 1 out of 5 times. It still happens now, but it's pretty rare.

I'm typing this from 2.0b2 and apt is updating everything right now.....There is a ffx update in there, I hope it's RC2, if it's not I will install it manually.

I'll post back to this thread later tonight after I give it a whirl.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[bunratty]

And yet whenever I ask how to reproduce "this memory issue" no one can tell me how to see it. Frankly, lots of us have no idea what you're referring to when you say you're having problems with memory usage in Firefox. Please, explain to us what the problem is, in enough detail that we can finally see it.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[chaoticgeek]

I have a some of the same things, all toghether though I only have like 10 extentions. But on average useage I only go up to maybe 60 megs of ram, and then I have lots of tabs open, mroe than 15 I would say. I have never come accross anyproblems with firefox slowing down or crashing on me.

Firefox Portable 2.0 RC2: Test Without Installing

[CritterNYC]

Firefox Portable 2.0 RC 2 has been released. For the unfamiliar, Firefox Portable is Firefox packaged with a PortableApps.com launcher so it can be run from a USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, CD, etc and used on any computer. It can also be run from a local hard drive (even your desktop) making it a great way to test out another version of Firefox without impacting your installed version. Grab it from the Firefox Portable 2.0 RC2 Homepage.

Google spyware included

[Anonymous Coward]

How does one completely remove Google spyware from FF 2.0? It's imposible.

Re:Google spyware included

[julesh]

From the FAQ:

# How do I turn Phishing Protection protection on or off?

On Windows and Linux, go to Tools > Options ... > Security. On Mac, go to Preferences > Options ... > Security.

Re:Google spyware included

[mabinogi]

You mean the disabled-by-default option to use Google (or potentially another search engine - hence the drop-down) to check if the site is a phising site?
The one that very clearly tells you what it will be doing and verifies that you really want to do it first?

The Anti-Phising feature itself is enabled by default, but by default it does _NOT_ use Google, it uses a downloaded blacklist.

My impression of it is certainly not "Google Spyware", it's "Framework for allowing Firefox to check pages against search engine results", the default search engine you can use - if you enable it - being Google.

Re:Google spyware included

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, you do not understand the difference between "remove it" and "turn it off". It's impossible to remove Google spy/bloatware.

Re:Google spyware included

[julesh]

Please, tell me what practical difference exists, besides the usage of maybe a couple of hundred K of your precious disk space?

Re:Google spyware included

[Hakubi_Washu]

it uses a downloaded blacklist.

Bingo. That counts as a privacy problem in my book.

Re:Google spyware included

[mabinogi]

How?

Re:Google spyware included

[Hakubi_Washu]

It is a connection, not authorized by the user, possibly giving the full HTTP-headers as well.

Additionally I won't trust that blacklist, as the authors are either with Google or the Mozilla corporation [sic]. But honestly there's enough discussion on that and similar issues already. Many devs siding with the "it's a feature"-aaproach either don't even remotely get it or seem to be malicious *shrugs* I don't expect the Mozilla team to recover from this anymore, I'll just wait till it gets so bad in a release that I'll change to a different browser (which is a shame, FF had the potential to behave like a "good" browser once upon a time)

Re:Google spyware included

[mabinogi]

> It is a connection, not authorized by the user, possibly giving the full HTTP-headers as well.
You haven't got the slightest idea how it works, and yet you're condemning it.
Stop and think about how a sane person would implement a blacklist based phishing protection system and _then_ explain to me how it's a privacy problem. (Hint, it won't include connecting to another party every time you go to a web page)

It's no more a privacy problem than when your anti-virus software downloads it's latest definition files.

Re:Google spyware included

[Hakubi_Washu]

I understand perfectly well, thank you. But I do consider anti-virus definition updates a privacy issue as well, maybe that's what you don't expect? I'm fully aware that the current implementation only downloads a blacklist from a single server once every day (or whatever the interval is), while the have-Google-check-the-URL-"feature" has to be enabled seperately. Don't assume I'm dumb or uninformed, just because I condemn a system you like, maybe I know what I'm doing and simply have a very different set of values from yours.

Re:Google spyware included

[mabinogi]

I suspected that might be the case after replying. In which case, you must be well aware that you are so far in the minority that you statistically don't even exist, and we never had this conversation ;)

Re:Google spyware included

[Hakubi_Washu]

Whew, I really feared we might get a little heated and am glad you understood me on your own :-) I have absolutely no problem with being in the minority (and I sure as hell know I am on this issue), I prefer that in fact, since I believe everyone can only be responsible for his/her own actions and thus any kind of group is, in the end, purely virtual. I'm a zealot when it comes to freedom, privacy ad standards, I know that, but I feel better this way :-D

Re:Google spyware included

[SanityInAnarchy]

It is a connection, not authorized by the user, possibly giving the full HTTP-headers as well.

I fail to see how my HTTP headers constitute a privacy issue. Oh no, the blocklists know I can accept gzip encoding, and that I prefer English! Somebody stop the thought police!

Re:Google spyware included

[Hakubi_Washu]

REFERER [sic] is a more intersting case, as is the fact that any connection over TCP/IP can be traced at a later time, allowing the ISP to identify the user, etc.

Re:Google spyware included

[Rits]

Does Firefox send a referer header when fetching a blacklist? That would be bad, but I seriously doubt this. This should be checkable with a tool like Wireshark.

As for the ISP identifying the user... I'm probably missing the point here, my ISP already knows me perfectly well, and can easily keep track of all the sites I visit. It doesn't matter which browser I use. For the truly paranoid, downloaders of kiddieporn, or those living in certain dictatorships, using Tor would be a workaround. The downloading of the blacklist will happen over the same proxied connection.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[HeroreV]

I had been hoping that Firefox 2 would be able to better compete with Opera.

Firefox: open source, free license
Opera: closed source, proprietary license

Firefox are winnar!!!

/. rendering champ...

[nixkuroi]

As long as Firefox is the only (of the big two) browser that renders the new slashdot comment section correctly, I'll be using it for that ;)

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Dexenian]

Maybe they should keep to the KISS rule ^_^, keeping it simple like google will more than likly to increase user numbers, and I totally agree with you on saying that leaving things as extensions. Because for one thing I would not need to have a spellchecker, smart search, and crash safty on my simlpe web browser taking up all the extra memory and space.

Remembering a quote: "Just let it do what it does, and what it is good at doing." (can't remember where.)

live bookmark features are still so archaic

[thunderland]

Concidering that Firefox was one of the strongest supporters of RSS in its early days, I'm supprised that come RC2, its live bookmark features are still so archaic. Nothing to indicate to me what I have already read, you can only open one item form a bookmark at a time, no keyword filtering, and still that unimaginative 'blank document' icon for the individual story items. Relatively small flaws, I know.

...So they offer to subcribe to a bookmark thru Google Reader, Bloglines etc., uhh, no thanks, the less 'services' i have to subscribe to get the features I want, and the less data I have to hand out to do so, the better.

Re:live bookmark features are still so archaic

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with that, and so do the folks who made LiveClick https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2499.

This extension adds the most functionality to the broken, broken live bookmarks built into Firefox.

Also, it works with FF 2.0, too.

Re:live bookmark features are still so archaic

[thunderland]

Yeah, there are a few good extensions that counteract the weakness that is FF live bookmarking. Although I have to use 3 seperate, heavy extensions to be able to get RSS in an ideal fashion. Needless to say, startup times are of the saddening variety.

Re:live bookmark features are still so archaic

[SCHecklerX]

That's what plugins are for. I use sage for RSS feeds.

Re:least favorite feature..the arrows on the tab b

[buswolley]

Thanks for the hint. I did not know that using the scroll wheel while over the tab bar scrolled them.. Thanks.

Memory problems due to hibernation and long use?

[Yubastard]

I believe that Firefox does eat up a lot of RAM, but it's usually after leaving it on, unused, for many days. Also, when I hibernate(Windows) with Firefox opened with lots of tabs, after hibernation Firefox is very slow, always, and more RAM gets eaten every time. I believe this is the reason for the session resume feature on Firefox 2, or at least it's a good idea because of this. Gotta try it tho'.

2.0? More like one and three quarters.

[david@ecsd.com]

o Web Search Pro doesn't seem to work.
o Icons are prettier.
o Tab bar doesn't work how I'm used to (an extension to make things Work Right)
o I already have session management via an extension.
o The new add ons manager is kind of nice.
o Scroll wheel no longer works on my tabs.
o Visual barfs all over in the theme (I figure those will be cleaned up by release date), in fact, there are all kinds of little inconsistencies with the theme I'm using; tabs don't match everything else, drop down lists, etc.
o The red squigglies are kinda nifty.

In all, I don't really see anything that's two point oh, or will make me do a "gotta have it" upgrade (unless, of course some "gotta have it" plugin doesn't work in the old one.

Big shrug.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[nwbvt]

Well what exactly do you expect people to do? Record every web site they visit, every key they press, every mouse movement they make, so that when the browser's memory usage eventually gets too high there is a clear record of what has happened? Its not like there is a secret key everyone (except apparently you, since you are one of the few people I know to claim to have never seen memory problems in Firefox) is pressing that magically causes the browser to hog ram. At least whenever I have seen it, it appears to be something that slowly creeps up over time, eventually getting to the point where the browser has to be restarted. Now some of that may well be in scripts within web pages that leak memory (many web developers seem to be unaware that you even can leak memory in JavaScript), but some of it is certainly in the browser.

I hate to break it to you, but not every software bug can be easily reproduced (especially when you are dealing with performance related bugs like this). You often have to deal with things that are sporadic at best. Disregarding them on the assumption that the people reporting them are just making up lies about the product you know to be perfect isn't going to help anyone.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you disabled "memory caching" in about:config? If so, re-enable it. It leaks ram without it. (massive amounts of ram like you're describing)

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Anonymous Coward]

Trivial to reproduce. Start up Firefox 1.5.x. Go to a site with lots and lots of images (if you don't mind porn, check out Trouserstew.com). Open 5-10 links in new tabs. Even if you keep closing those tabs after they are fully loaded, you can make Firefox memory usage spike to the several hundreds of megabytes within a few minutes of browsing time. Repeatable on any Windows box that I've tried it on. Once memory gets all eaten up, images stop appearing, and the browser just buckles and has to be restarted.

I am sure you can find some examples of non-porn sites that have lots of large images on single pages that can trigger this issue too.

Real World Browser Usage Stats

[s7uar7]

I work on a major UK commercial website (and no, it's not the one in my profile:)); it's completely non-IT related and has a very wide demographic, although geographically 95% of visitors are from the UK. The August browser usage stats were:

IE6.x - 89.06%
Firefox 1.x - 5.29%
IE5.x - 2.05%
IE7.x - 1.51%
Safari 4.x - 0.92%
Safari 3.x - 0.37%
Mozilla 1.x - 0.12%
Opera 9.x - 0.12%

Firefox was up slightly from 5.22% in July. It surprised me how low it was, considering I keep reading stories of how FF is up to nearly 15%. Yes, some of this could be down to people spoofing the User-agent to show as IE, but how many people really do that? It still has a lot of catching up to do.

Re:Real World Browser Usage Stats

[julesh]

No matter how wide your demographic is, it'll be self selecting to some degree.

Here's the stats for a site my company runs; again, no IT-related content, primarily UK visitors, etc., in fact bias is probably towards people who have little interest in IT. Figures are aggregate for last 3 months, because I can't be bothered to run a direct comparison with yours.

Internet Explorer 6.x 80.91%
Firefox 6.05%

Yes, I think 15% is an exaggeration. I suspect the real value (for UK users) might be as high as 7%. It is still increasing.

Re:Real World Browser Usage Stats

[BenoitRen]

You said yourself that it's visited mostly by UK residents. It's known that Firefox browser share is different in each country. For example, it's much higher in Germany.

Re:Real World Browser Usage Stats

[Anonymous Coward]

are you from the future? the latest stable Safari is at 2.04. so either those stats are made up, or you don't know what you're talking about.

Posting from Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3
which is Safari 2.0.4

Re:Real World Browser Usage Stats

[Kelson]

Posting from Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3 which is Safari 2.0.4

Not that you can tell that from the UA string. I simply don't understand why Safari insists on using a build number instead of the actual version number. Use the build number for the WebKit part, but for the Safari part, why not use the actual version number?

Back on topic, I'd guess those stats are taking the build number and dividing by 100, hence "Safari 4.x."

Re:Real World Browser Usage Stats

[michaelhood]

Just checked the stats on a major US-only apparel site. IE - 78.17%, FF 14.42%. As reported by Google Analytics.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[E IS mC(Square)]

Opera is the new blue on /.

Congrats on your troll (and probably, I am following you).

But whatever you said is right, switched to opera (to see why every troll on a FF story is masturbating on it) , and back to FF (and now, V2.0 RC2). Its not a memory pig for me (because I do not open 255 tabs just to see how far it can go, and I don't install every freaking extension out there). And on a dual core with 1.5G or RAM, I don't really give a fuck about 100mb more than when it used to be Phoenix.

And an in-built anti-phishing is very much welcome - even if its going to add 50MB more. Because, one fine day, it may save me from losing some money.

Let Me Guess

[joe_n_bloe]

Your organization is huge, and your stats include your employees browsing the IE-only company directory and org chart.

I knew Firefox had caught on when every web site except Myspace started working right.

Re:Let Me Guess

[s7uar7]

No, these are for an internet-facing site only. Employees wouldn't use it any more than the public.

Good for the goose not good for the gander.

[Kadin2048]

Well with the OS it's different than when an application RAM-hogs.

It's not like (at least on most desktop, non-mainframe systems) like the OS is really competing for memory with any other OS. It's not shared. The OS knows who's trying to use the memory and how much is "extra" at any given time, thus it can just use whatever's left over at the moment for cache.

With an application, it shouldn't ever request more memory than it actually needs to operate, because it doesn't have the "god perspective" that the OS does, to determine how much is underutilized and ought to be taken up by stuff that's less-than-critical.

If every application did what you're describing Firefox doing, we'd be in a lot of trouble; the OS would never get to do any of those cute "spare" memory tricks that it does, because the apps would be trying to use way more memory than they actually needed to perform their core functions.

Applications should only take what they need to survive; there's only room for one bloated thing that hogs memory, and it has to be at the top of the food chain.

Re:Good for the goose not good for the gander.

[MindStalker]

In fairness when I have an application like firefox on top I (generally) would like to use as much memory as it wants then reduce to next to nothing when minimized. There is actually a setting to make firefox reduce its memory on minimize, and it works well. What there is not a setting for is "don't use much resoures right now, cause I'm working on other stuff as well".

Re:Good for the goose not good for the gander.

[CaptainZapp]

Applications should only take what they need to survive; there's only room for one bloated thing that hogs memory, and it has to be at the top of the food chain.

You have to exclude database engines from this overall correct quote. With a database you need predictability. You cannot rely that the database gets the required resources during runtime. Thus those resources (most specific memory) must be acquired upfront when you startup the database.

Is this a waste of resources? I'd venture that this is not necessarily the case. A good DBA will calculate the resource requirements upfront and configure the database engine appropriately.

I don't mean to nitpick. But this is certainly the overall exception to the rule.

Re:Good for the goose not good for the gander.

[MadMidnightBomber]

If every application did what you're describing Firefox doing, we'd be in a lot of trouble; the OS would never get to do any of those cute "spare" memory tricks that it does, because the apps would be trying to use way more memory than they actually needed to perform their core functions.

Damn right! All that 'free' memory belongs to Emacs, no johnny-come-lately web browser should get a look in.

Re:Good for the goose not good for the gander.

[macshit]

With an application, it shouldn't ever request more memory than it actually needs to operate, because it doesn't have the "god perspective" that the OS does, to determine how much is underutilized and ought to be taken up by stuff that's less-than-critical.

Er, that's a bit simplistic.

A modern OS with demand paging can pretty well manage apps using lots of memory as long as the apps' working set is reasonable. In many cases, it's far better for an app to use a simpler algorithm that uses more memory, or just use lots of memory to cache stuff (rather than implementing its own complicated disk-caching scheme), and let the OS worry about juggling things, because often the OS can do a better job. Morever, mapping lots of memory (either from file or anonymous memory) is typically almost free, as long as you don't touch it (and even with anonymous memory, mapping lots of untouched space can be useful, e.g., for some sort of sparse data structure).

Of course, there are caveats to this:

1. Some OSes are better than others at managing memory; modern versions of linux are pretty good, reputedly much better than ms-windows (though I don't use windows often enough to really judge).
2. It obviously depends on the way all this memory is being used -- if the app really does touch all that memory repeatedly, it has to be more careful
3. There are obviously still limits, due to paging-file/swap-partition sizes etc; the point is not that apps should totally ignore memory usage, but that there's much more headroom than many people think.

Re:Good for the goose not good for the gander.

[doom]

Damn right! All that 'free' memory belongs to Emacs, no johnny-come-lately web browser should get a look in.

Actually, by modern standards emacs doesn't really use all that much memory on it's own...

There are, however, applications written in emacs that seem to require gross amounts of memory (e.g. gnus).

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[E IS mC(Square)]

Stock Firefox needs at least half a dozen extensions just to get the basic functionality it should come with by default.

First cry about having FF loaded with extra features, which could be extensions. Then cry about FF not having enough features so that you have to install 6 extensions.

Why don't you just ask FF, and the team might just take their pants off for ya?

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Anonymous Coward]

> Well what exactly do you expect people to do? Record every web site they visit, every key they press, every mouse movement they make, so that when the browser's memory usage eventually gets too high there is a clear record of what has happened?
Yes, if you really want the bug fixed that much then you need to go the extra distance to help the developers reproduce it.

> I hate to break it to you, but not every software bug can be easily reproduced (especially when you are dealing with performance related bugs like this). You often have to deal with things that are sporadic at best.

Well unless you expect someone to manually trace through every possible code path in the source code to look for the bug, then it's going to need to be reproducable for it to get priority.
When given a choice between spending a month tracking down 1 hard to reproduce bug and actually fixing 50 easily reproducable bugs the 50 will win nearly every time.

>Disregarding them on the assumption that the people reporting them are just making up lies about the product you know to be perfect isn't going to help anyone.
I don't think anyone's saying that. But between the difficulting reproducing it, and possibly a diferent understanding of what exactly constitutes a "memory leak" - and particularly how to measure that - It may well be that any time a developer goes looking for it they instead find legitimate instances of large memory usage.

Images do actually take up a lot of memory - particularly since the browser probably holds a reference to the uncompressed bitmap, not the original image, so if you've got a lot of images open on a lot of tabs, you _will_ use a lot of memory. It's also possible that when that memory is released it is not actually reclaimed by the operating system untill such time as it's really needed, and depending on how you're measuring the memory usage of an application, it might appear that the memory has not been freed. That's what I mean by having a different understanding of what a leak is.

Just as the users aren't making it up, neither are the developers. I'm sure that no developer that would be able to fix such a bug who actually encountered it in a reproduceable way (or at least in a way that would give a clue to it's whereabouts) would deliberately ignore it. In fact they'd be ecstatic. They must be absolutely sick of hearing about it by now and would like nothing better than to be able to get rid of it once and for all.

Re:least favorite feature..the arrows on the tab b

[Anonymous Coward]

it's not intuitive that mousing over the tab bar and using the mouse scroll wheel will scroll the tabs

Mouse to close tabs? You know, there is something called keyboard, right there. A single hand combo Ctrl-w will be magical to you.

No, I want the close button on every single tab. Thats where it should be, because thats where it belongs.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[julesh]

many web developers seem to be unaware that you even can leak memory in JavaScript

If you can leak memory in JavaScript and it isn't reclaimed when you navigate to a new page, it's a bug in the JavaScript implementation, not the web dev's code. Of course, it is the developer's responsibility to *work around* bugs in browsers (where possible), but you can't expect them to be aware of them all. A polite e-mail to webmaster@... would be useful in many cases.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[julesh]

My understanding is that that particular bug is both known and fixed in 2.0.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[kjart]

He answered your question in his post:

I didn't have any non-default extensions installed

Two Versions plus

[Propaganda13]

FireFox
FireFox Lite
plus optional extension pack that includes all extensions in FireFox

Personally, I'd take FireFox Lite and the extension pack. So I get minimal bloat and features that I actually use.

Re:Two Versions plus

[SeaFox]

FireFox
FireFox Lite
plus optional extension pack that includes all extensions in FireFox

That solution has been suggested more than once, but keeps getting rejected. I think it's a good idea but the powers at Mozilla think it will cause confusion.

Re:Two Versions plus

[cloricus]

As some one who works with newbs every day I can say without a doubt that the Mozilla people are one hundred percent correct. Having the one download means people will use it; if you put two there they wont know which one to get and wont bother at all...even if you label effectively.

Re:Two Versions plus

[SeaFox]

As some one who works with newbs every day I can say without a doubt that the Mozilla people are one hundred percent correct.

I agree it would lead to confusion unless you effectively hid one of the options from view, which is what I think they should do. Make the "lite" version buried in an "other versions" page or something like that. Newbies may need some hand-holding and "limitations" placed to get them through things, but that's no reason why everyone should be limited by their lack of savvy.

Re:Two Versions plus

[Red Alastor]

But they don't have to offer many downloads. They just have to put the extra features as extensions which are installed by default no matter what. If you don't like them, uninstall them and if you change your mind later, add them as you'd do with any extension.

On the other hand, everybody forced to have a spell-checker would mean that slashdotters would have no more excuses for misspelling ridiculous.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[aichpvee]

I don't think you understood what I said. I asked if it mattered because there is no choice in using extensions. Out of the box Firefox isn't even useable as an everyday browser. The stock configuration is ridiculous and can't be adequately changed without extensions. Don't even get me started on the bad (chrome) and worse (gtk2) options for file dialogs on Linux.

So again, if you missed the point (again!), Firefox isn't a useable browser without extensions and if some necessary extensions significantly decrease performance these features should be built in, which surely would run better than as an extension.

If you want step-by-step instructions, just start up Firefox and see the clunky, backwards, and outdated interface. Firefox 2 doesn't seem to be fixing any of these problems, and looks to be making many of them much worse. Too bad it's still the best browser on Linux, due to Opera's weird graphical issues with KDE, and more importantly its annoying habit of crashing on my bank's website.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions - NOT!

[enrevanche]

While these extensions may all have memory problems, they are not the main cause of memory leaks in Firefox. With none but the default settings causes the browser to constantly eat memory, there is a problem. This is consistent in both Firefox and Seamonkey. Somewhere in the common code is a memory leak and the developers do not want to fix it. The problem may be difficult to find or it may be a serious architecture flaw that cannot be easily fixed but this has been a "feature" of this code base for a long time. I've seen firefox grow to 1.3GB on my system. This is without any plugins/extensions installed except flash.

This is a real problem and I wish that those of you who don't see it would stop telling everyone that it is their fault. Most firefox users probably never install any plugins/extensions yet many of them have the problem.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[enrevanche]

Absolutley. I've had FF use 1.3GB of memory on a !G system. Typically it will grow to 600-700MB before I restart it. I've seen this with every version of firefixx and seamonkey on both linux and windows (i've not used it on OS X or unix). This is with no extensions installed and only the flash plugin.

News story sites also cause this problem

[billstewart]

Glad to hear it's better under Windows, since (sigh) that's what I mostly use.

I normally read news by looking through the index pages and opening up all the stories I'm interested in in tabs - either Google/BBC/NYTimes if I want serious news, or Fark if I want silly news with snide remarks - and I get the same kind of explosive memory growth there too. Unlike image browsing, the problem with diverse-source news material is that lots of it has Javascript, often badly written for IE, and it often has ad banners and whatever different advertising clutter the sites want to use, so you end up with large varieties of dreck all trying to use memory. Not only does the system go into swapping overdose, but there's always at least one unhappy Java-something problem that wants to burn CPU cycles as well.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[enrevanche]

I have no extensions installed and only the flash plugin. FF has been open for 4 hours and is using 408 MB. I guess I need to install these extensions/plugins in order to reduce my memory usage.

How's the downloader and the search function?

[bunbuntheminilop]

They always used to annoy me. Thats not why I switched to Opera, but you don't care do you. You're reading this comment, because I'm trolling.

Thats ok! You're free to read whatever you want to read and mod me how ever you wish.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions - NOT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Might the problem be related to Flash? I don't have a problem with memory usage in Firefox, but I always use Flashblock.

Of *course* I leave it up for days at a time.

[billstewart]

There's no excuse for it to have trouble with that - if the thing's written decently, then when you close a window or tab it'll free the resources that that window or tab was using, and you'll be back to where you were before you opened them. If I go read news by opening 50 tabs, each of which has an article I'm interested in, then it may take whatever memory it takes to keep them all open at once, but when I'm done reading them and close them it should free them. If you write code in a language with garbage collection, that should get handled automagically, and if you write code in a language that doesn't do that, it's your responsibility to tell the program when you're done with something so the memory mechanisms it does have can work, and if you're not doing that, you've written lousy code.

Of course, the operating system should also be able to cope with the fact that your program currently needs 300 MB more RAM than you've got physically installed and do a decent job of keeping the working set in memory, the inactive stuff on disk if necessary, and not haul the whole bloody mess in and out of disk just because you want to close one tab and read the next. And the program should cooperate with this by not going and touching every bit of memory every time it does that, so that you can avoid thrashing things, but that is a somewhat higher-difficulty level of programming that simple basics like freeing objects you're not using.

If you've got an operating system with run-times that are measured in months, quarters, and occasionally years, and you're either running on a desktop or server or else you're running on a laptop with a standby feature and don't let the battery die all the way, there's no reason you should ever have to kill off your browser just to clean up the memory leaks. In my case, my Corporate IT Department thinks Windows XP should be rebooted weekly (the way we did with Vaxes 20 years ago) and I should at least be able to keep Mozilla running for that long, and for longer if I remember to hibernate the thing on Saturday nights so the poor excuse for a crontab doesn't reboot it.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[shmlco]

Heavier, but oddly not enough so to deserve a "2.0" complete version number upgrade.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[trifish]

It would be easy to blame it on some "bad" extensions. However, people report Firefox consumes 650 MB of RAM after 3 hours of usage without any extensions installed. See eg. http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=199 593&cid=16345589

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[cammoblammo]

I don't know if anyone else has seen this, but I have memory issues with FF if two conditions are met:

1) The browser has been open for several days (this isn't always necessary, but it seems to make the problem more obvious); and

2) I run memory intensive apps on my computer -- eg edit a 100 MB image in the GIMP or run an apt-get upgrade.

If I do these things, FF slows to an unbearable crawl. Shutting it down and refiring fixes all. (BTW I'm running Debian Sid, 256 MB Ram and a Gig or so of swap.)

Re: That has got to be the most ignorant shit...

[RulerOf]

...I've ever heard.

Sorry, trying to make Firefox look bad hasn't worked in the past and it won't work now.

You're basically saying, "Even things such as massive memory management issues can't make Firefox look bad, and that, of course, is by virtue of its being Firefox." That's some type of logical flaw, but I forget which one it is.

Of course, I happen to love Internet Explorer, especially IE7RC1. And nothing, not even the new Anti-Phising features and the low memory usage for multiple tabs and instances can make my browser look good. It hasn't worked in the past and it won't work now.

ping attribute

[Hakubi_Washu]

It's not on the changes list and the source is a bit hefty to search for it when you don't know your way around it, but: Does anyone know whether Darin's "ping" attribute (of WhatWG origin) is included and active? Aside from the auto-active google spyware that would be another nail in FFs (and every Gecko-based browsers) coffin on my systems...

(On a related note: What other RMS-type "free" alternative do you work on, use or recommend? I'll probably switch to Konqueror as soon as FF2 goes through the update system), but I'd like to have a few options... And don't say Amaya, ok? :-P)

Re:ping attribute

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I have heard, no 2.0 RC2 does not have the "ping" (a ping="...) attribute. But 3.0 have it in the trunk.
I don't like the ping thing, I hope it don't get implemented. :(

Re:ping attribute

[Hakubi_Washu]

Thanks, that's what I thought.
Maybe someone has thouroughly checked 2 already, and can guarantee it.

It's a shame how some parts of the Mozilla community behave when it comes to issues such as ping...

Re:ping attribute

[Anonymous Coward]

> Aside from the auto-active google spyware that would be another nail in FFs (and every Gecko-based browsers) coffin on my systems...
that's interesting, because there isn't any auto-active google spyware in it.

I wish people would stop making stuff up.

Re:ping attribute

[Hakubi_Washu]

I don't make stuff up, as you put it. But our definitions might diverge on one or two issues. For me an active-by-default system to download a blacklist counts as privacy violation, even if I could activate an even worse system that would send URLs to Google.

Re:ping attribute

[Anonymous Coward]

For me an active-by-default system to download a blacklist counts as privacy violation

Out of curiosity, what privacy is being violated in this case?

Re:ping attribute

[cortana]

It lets Google see his IP address! As you know, such broadcasting of one's IP address can be dangerous. Only this morning I recieved a helpful popup message about it.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Ginger Unicorn]

The more free RAM you have the faster your system will go, because the OS uses free RAM space to cache files from the hard disk. Kind of like the opposite of a swap file. And if you think having a swap file and a disk cache on at the same time is silly and inefficient, for some reason it isnt. I think it's to do with having the right stuff in the right place at the right time.

Totally!

[neoshroom]

Firefox has finally sucumbed to the Safari tab style.

Re:Totally!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean Opera.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[cortana]

Well what exactly do you expect people to do? Record every web site they visit, every key they press, every mouse movement they make, so that when the browser's memory usage eventually gets too high there is a clear record of what has happened?

It would be easier for someone to write an extension that logs each page viewed by the user, along with the images, plugins, embedded objects and scripts encountered, the amount of reserved/resident/private dirty memory allocated to the firefox process, and a list of what firefox itsemf thinks the memory is allocated for and how much it thinks it is using.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[cortana]

For the record, I've had epiphany (using xulrunner 1.8.0.7) open for 80 hours now. It has mapped 326 MB of memory, of which 122 MB is resident and 93 MB is 'private dirty'. So I can't claim to see this memory problem.

The plugins I have installed are the totem movie player, Java 1.5.0_08-b03, and Flash 9.0 r68. I use the CSS rules at http://www.floppymoose.com/ to block Flash until I click on it. Do you block Flash movies?

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[cortana]

Firefox: open source, free license

Unless you want to keep using the Firefox name.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[bunratty]

I don't think you understood what I said. Although you may need to use extensions, you may easily avoid the ones that significantly decrease performance.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions - NOT!

[bunratty]

While these extensions may all have memory problems, they are not the main cause of memory leaks in Firefox. With none but the default settings causes the browser to constantly eat memory, there is a problem.

Yes, that would be a problem. Could you finally tell us how to see this problem? Many users, myself included, are not able to cause "the browser to constantly eat memory" without using an extension with a severe memory leak.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[bunratty]

They must be absolutely sick of hearing about it by now and would like nothing better than to be able to get rid of it once and for all.

Exactly! Tell us how to see it, and the problem can soon be gone forever!

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[cortana]

I'm sure part of the percieved problem is that users don't have the first clue about how operating systems manage memory, and therefore don't know how to correctly interpret the numbers they see in top and the Windows task manager.

Flock

[BenoitRen]

It sounds like you would like Flock.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[bunratty]

I understand that. However, absolutely none of these people can report how to reproduce the problem, so no one can see what it is and it cannot be fixed. Additionally, as is said even in the famous InternetWeek article about Firefox 1.5 problems, it is clearly only a "on a small percentage of Windows, Mac, and Linux computers" that this problem occurs. The people who are not using those computers don't see any problem.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[bunratty]

Well what exactly do you expect people to do? Record every web site they visit, every key they press, every mouse movement they make, so that when the browser's memory usage eventually gets too high there is a clear record of what has happened?

I've never had to work that hard to find the steps to reproduce a memory problem. And if lots of people are seeing the problem, then at least a few people will get lucky and be able to find steps easily. The fact that no one has been able to find the problem is an indication of just how rare the problem is.

It's in Perl, and Perl is huge

[tepples]

you could look at a weblog entry from David Baron and see if you can make the problem occur somewhere else.

The problem here is that the log analysis script is provided as Perl source code, and ActivePerl is three times the size of Firefox. Or which other distribution of Perl for Microsoft Windows do you recommend?

Re:It's in Perl, and Perl is huge

[cerberusss]

Yeah, I noticed that, it's a shame really that it's not plain old compiled code :-/

If you want users to report bugs, you should make it dead simple. In any case, even if you already have Perl installed, it stil seems like a bucket of work with a small chance of success.

Parent not REALLY a troll

[Hakubi_Washu]

Sadly there's a grain of truth to the parent's post. The Mozilla devs have time and time again decided to include, auto-activate and not provide an UI to disable rather heavily discussed functions. Sometimes they really go the extra mile to make sure the user uses something they consider "necessary", while privacy advocates, standards zealots and other people who try to make the net a better place shake their heads in horror over the "feature".

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[trifish]

Hard to rerpoduce bugs may suggest low-quality underlying code. Opera doesn't have these problems (hell even IE6 doesn't). Go figure.

So do you mean 4.0?

[tepples]

Are the reflow branch's changes expect to land on the trunk before or after the branch that will become 3.0 is cut?

Re:So do you mean 4.0?

[BZ]

The reflow branch is expected to land on trunk before the Gecko 1.9 (Firefox 3.0) branch is cut.

So how does the user grant "knowledge"?

[tepples]

I don't EVER want JS to be working with local files or devices without some serious security models put in place to prevent web sites from doing nasty things without my knowledge.

So if the user loads a JS app from the local file system, how should the user grant "knowledge" to the app?

Re:So how does the user grant "knowledge"?

[MrNaz]

Don't you watch the news? Granting "knowledge" is illegal these days.

In seriousness, JS is supposed to run in a sandbox. *If* I theoretically launch a JS app, I want it to run inside whatever it loads in, most likley my browser, and to have no permissions outside that. If you want to write an app that interacts with files and directories, use a more appropriate language for it. How many applications can you name that are written in JS and designed to run independently anyway?

Whats with all the idiots replying to my message about local apps as though someone plans on writing a text editor or imaging tool with it. Get real you lot, JS is NOT for writing local apps in, its for giving a bit of zing to HTML. Stop trying to use a shovel when a torque wrench is needed. Methinks these guys don't know how to use anything other than HTML/JS. You know, every problem looks like a nail to a guy who only knows how to use a hammer.

Re:So how does the user grant "knowledge"?

[tepples]

In seriousness, JS is supposed to run in a sandbox.

So how do I copy a file into the sandbox so that the JS can edit it and then copy the file back out when it is done?

*If* I theoretically launch a JS app, I want it to run inside whatever it loads in, most likley my browser, and to have no permissions outside that. If you want to write an app that interacts with files and directories, use a more appropriate language for it.

Interacting with files in a file system is a function of libraries, not languages. It'd be like taking C or BASIC, giving it no ability to draw graphics, and saying if you want to do graphics, use Logo instead.

Get real you lot, JS is NOT for writing local apps in, its for giving a bit of zing to HTML.

Then what interpreted language which is available on multiple platforms but still easy to use on Windows should I be writing local apps in? Why is Firefox a 6 MB download and ActivePerl a 15 MB download?

Re:So how does the user grant "knowledge"?

[MrNaz]

So how do I copy a file into the sandbox so that the JS can edit it and then copy the file back out when it is done?

and

Interacting with files in a file system is a function of libraries, not languages. It'd be like taking C or BASIC, giving it no ability to draw graphics, and saying if you want to do graphics, use Logo instead.

JaveScript. Is. Not. For. That. JS is supposed to execute within a rendering engine, making the HTML it is displaying dynamic. I'm convinced you're missing my point on purpose.

Re:So how does the user grant "knowledge"?

[tepples]

JaveScript. Is. Not. For. That.

Many critics' initial reaction to Visual Basic: "BASIC. Is. Not. For. That."

JS is supposed to execute within a rendering engine, making the HTML it is displaying dynamic.

You're using "JavaScript" as a term for the use of programs in the ECMAScript language to manipulate an HTML DOM, right? So what is the name for the use of programs in the ECMAScript language to manipulate objects in a file system?

Re:So how does the user grant "knowledge"?

[MrNaz]

So what is the name for the use of programs in the ECMAScript language to manipulate objects in a file system?

Something else. Maybe we can call it yo momma. I'm done with this thread. Seeya.

Broke my bookmarks

[rizole]

Fuggit.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially on very image intensive sites, that used to cause Firefox to gobble up memory until it usually died after a short period of time (uhhh, I won't explain what kind of "image intensive sites" I'm talking about here, you can figure it out I'm sure). :)

Thanks for pointing that out. As non-AC no less. I experience the same problem, but I can't bring myself to post a bug report saying "go to this pr0n forum, CTRL-click on twenty ImageShack images to open them in a new tab, save 15 of them, rinse, repeat, for 30 mins or until you feel erm, happy, whichever comes first." Nah, can't do it.

But it happens, nonetheless. Also, somebody needs to fix the Download manager. It shouldn't matter if it's full of 50 downloads or 5000, it shouldn't get slower at saving because it hasn't been cleared recently.

I use Opera for all my pr0n needs now. Which works OK, because it doesn't fill my Firefox autocomplete with entries like "Natalie Portman hot grits jpeg".

Excuse me?

[Hakubi_Washu]

While I LOL? I have a system with an uptime measured in weeks and then is shut down only because I don't want to leave it on when I leave the house for more than a couple of days. Essentially I keep browser, email, calendar and OGG-Player on at all times. While FF doesn't seem to have too many problems with that for me, it is easily the thing I expect! Now, one might argue that I'm not a typical user, but even the Win-drones in my circle of friends leave their systems running for days when they don't have to sleep next to the fans. Most keep a browser open as well, one simply needs it too often to wait for it to restart all the time... In fact I virtually know nobody who doesn't keep their browser open as long as the systems up. Maybe you're willing to provide us with some scientifc research regarding the usage patterns of "normal" FF-users (FF-users are certainly a group distinct from web-users, as they already have a minimum amount of technical knowledge)?

Re:Excuse me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uptime of weeks on a home computer? Just wondering what your electric bill looks like.

Re:Excuse me?

[Anonymous Coward]

$.20/kilowatt-hour (high estimate), 30-day billing cycle, 100-watt idle draw (overestimate) = $14.40.

Not cheap, certainly, but the ability to throttle power usage is not rare these days, and that is a high power cost estimate. Still, it only comes out to the price of one overpriced pizza or one and a half reasonably-priced pizzas a month. Hardly a bank-breaker.

Search for text when I start typing

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did the "highlight all instances" go? That was one of the key functions that got several people I introduced to Firefox to got to love.

Also this comes out as Safari just adds it in.
http://images.appleinsider.com/mom-safar3-1.jpg

Why did they remove them? Anyone got a clue?

Re:Search for text when I start typing

[Kelson]

Where did the "highlight all instances" go?

Not sure why it doesn't show up with find-as-you-type, but it's still there if you hit Ctrl+F.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[fatphil]

"""
And an in-built anti-phishing is very much welcome - even if its going to add 50MB more. Because, one fine day, it may save me from losing some money.
"""

Is there some new kind of geek-cred for displaying the height of your stupidity in public?

What do I care? Not a whit. Install bloat-ware for idiots 2.0, it's your machine.

FatPhil

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had bothered to read the parent's post, you would have noticed that he already answered your stupid question:

I had been hoping that Firefox 2 would be able to better compete with Opera. I was hoping that it would render faster, while also consuming far less memory. My Firefox 2 RC2 process from early this afternoon ended up hitting about 650 MB of RAM (measured with top) before I had to kill the process. And that was only after about three hours of use, in total. I didn't have any non-default extensions installed, so they aren't to blame.

Don't blame the memory leaks only on extensions. There are major memory leaks even when only those that come with Firefox itself are being used.

My Good, Bad and Ugly of Firefox 2 RC2

[Conanymous Award]

Good: -Feels faster than 1.5.7. But then again, this is just a feeling. -Close Tab buttons now in each individual tab Bad: -Popups not blocked by default. Well, not necessarily bad, rather an annoyance. And maybe this doesn't make people confused like if they were blocked by default and people expect some certain popup to actually pop up. -Cannot separately block cookies coming from other servers than the wbsite I'm visiting. Now it's all or nothing in cookie blocking in Firefox. -Spellcheck on by default. The annoyance, the annoyance. Ugly: -My RSS feeds and bookmarks are WIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDE now. Yet still the GUI in RSS feeds and bookmarks manages to waste valuable screen estate at the left edges of the dropdown menu. You could almost fit two of those little RSS symbols there between the edge and the symbol (which takes up some space in its own right). I actually tried switching to Safari, but the way it manages RSS is horrendous. I want my RSS feeds in neat dropdown menus, dammit.

Re:least favorite feature..the arrows on the tab b

[MrNaz]

Having 13 close buttons that all do the same thing is dumb. Middle button to close a tab if you're too lazy to click it and then close it. Why have a dozen methods to close a tab? Especially if one of those methods negatively impacts something important, like the number of readable tabs that can be open at once.

Anyway, in one breath you advocate the use of keyboard shortcuts, and in the next you say you want mouse driven close buttons on every tab.

Hello? Dr. Jekyl? I was wondering if I could have a chat with Mr. Hyde please...

typo

[Hakubi_Washu]

"privacy and standards", of course, though the typo had some kind of poetic justice to it... That's what I get for making last minute additions after previewing a post, I guess :-P

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[dlZ]

I understand that. However, absolutely none of these people can report how to reproduce the problem, so no one can see what it is and it cannot be fixed. Additionally, as is said even in the famous InternetWeek article about Firefox 1.5 problems, it is clearly only a "on a small percentage of Windows, Mac, and Linux computers" that this problem occurs. The people who are not using those computers don't see any problem.

I have to agree about the small number of machines. On /. you see people constantly complaining about the memory leaks, yet I never experience these problems on any of the machines I use on a daily basis. That would include my MacBook, desktop running SuSE 10.1, desktop running Windows XP SP2, and a laptop running XP also. I've never experienced the problem, actually. Firefox is shutdown on my MacBook whenever there is an update requiring me to restart the system and that's about it, too. It'll stay up for weeks at a time, without a single problem, including memory leaks. Actually, it tends to stay up for weeks on end on the SuSE desktop, also, as it's my home machine and I tend to just walk away from it and leave for work or whatnot.

If Opera works so much better for someone, just run Opera. I have Opera installed on a few of my machines also, and use it sometimes. But I still prefer Firefox.

Close buttons on tabs

[DnasTheGreat]

about:config

Set browser.tabs.closeButtons
0 - close button on active tab
1 - default, close button on all tabs
2 - no close buttons at all
3 - close button on side, like 1.x

Only caveat is that the tablist button stays in option 3, so it looks rather awkward. I do not see an option to remove it.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[JackieBrown]

I think Konqueror is a viable alternative since you are running KDE

Re:Wtf! Advertising on the download page?

[cortana]

Please stop spreading FUD. Mozilla are forcing Debian to change the name.

All browsers using blocklists

[CritterNYC]

And you do realize that all the browsers are adding the ability to do anti-phishing with blacklists, right? Firefox 2.0 has one. Internet Explorer 7.0 has one. Opera 9 has "anti-phishing technology" built in and, rumor has it, is adding a similar blacklist. I'd be willing to bet Safari and Konqueror will be adding one, too.

The thing is, this is a very *good* thing for average Joe non-techie, since that's the type of person that falls for phishing scams more often than not. And, even though it isn't much of a problem for us, it's still a huge issue in terms of most folks' online activities. If you're worried about a single connection to a server to download a phishing list, you can disable that. Just as you can disable automatic updates, which connects to the same server and is also enabled by default.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[bunratty]

Opera doesn't have these problems

This is nothing more than yet another instance of fabricated bad news about Firefox. Of course Opera has problems like this. You can browse around the Opera forums and find instances of Opera hogging memory and CPU. And yet no one says Opera is a memory or CPU hog. Go figure.

Appeal to Common Practice

[Hakubi_Washu]

Appeal to Common Practice

I simply prefer my software safe-by-design (and I do not trust the authors of the blacklist, a simple fact), you may disagree, but that that doesn't invalidate my preference (and nothing more it is).

Re:Wtf! Advertising on the download page?

[jonasj]

No, *you* please stop spreading FUD. Debian (really the Debian firefox maintainer) chose to change the name. All Mozilla is saying that you cannot apply random patches to Firefox and still call it Firefox. If I modified the cd images of the latest stable Debian release, and distributed them widely while advertising them as "Debian", I'm sure the Debian project would be a little pissed. This is no different. If Debian wants to change Firefox and keep the name, it's only fair that they run them by Mozilla first. That's what Fedora and Suse are doing.

Link

[Hakubi_Washu]

Just in case you aren't familiar with fallacies: Appeal to Common Practice

Re:Wtf! Advertising on the download page?

[cortana]

Hence, Mozilla are forcing them to change the name.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Millenniumman]

No software product lets you do that. Otherwise, anyone could add an "rm -R /" to the program, and distribute it as a respected project. That would cripple that product's reputation. You can use the source, but you can't claim your modifications to be the official software of an organization or person.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[cortana]

I think we should ban general purpose computers altogether. People shouldn't even be allowed to install software on their own computers, because they may be tricked into installing a trojan horse or a virus, etc.

It's funny how this has never been an issue before. But now that mozilla.org has been replaced by mozilla.com, porting Firefox to your operating system becomes forbidden!

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Hachey]

I have 17 extensions and my ram never goes above about 130, and since 2.0 RC2 not really above 70. I use multiple tabs and leave it open all the time. The problems individuals have must be something else, cause all the reports I hear are varied, and every build of FF 2.0 RC2, as far as I know, is the same. I think it's user-end personally.

MNG Support?

[molo]

Can anyone tell me if MNG support will _finally_ be included?

-molo

Re:MNG Support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone tell me if MNG support will _finally_ be included?

It's always fascinating to see people ask about such highly specific features (bordering, in fact, on the esoteric) as support for MNG images. One would think that everyone who has an interest in such a format would follow the discussions concerning MNG support in Mozilla browsers at least so closely that they wouldn't have to ask on Slashdot if "anyone can tell" them the current state of the matter.

Anyway, the answer is no, MNG will not be included in Firefox 2.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Kelson]

Does it matter? Stock Firefox needs at least half a dozen extensions just to get the basic functionality it should come with by default.

"Basic functionality" is, of course, subjective. What might be critical for one person is useless cruft for another.

For instance, nearly all of the extensions I have installed fall into one of two categories: developer tools or website integration (del.icio.us, etc.). I would hardly consider something like the Web Developer Toolbar "basic functionality" for most people, but I find it incredibly useful when working on a website. The one exception is Duplicate Tab, which allows me to split a tab off into its own window.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[nwbvt]

"Yes, if you really want the bug fixed that much then you need to go the extra distance to help the developers reproduce it."

Its much easier to just switch to Opera. I have nothing riding on the success of Firefox. The ones that do are the Mozilla foundation. Coincidentally, since they have access to the source code, they are in the best position to find these bugs.

Also, most organizations put their products through stress tests which reveal these sorts of errors. If Mozilla's developers cannot find these rather common situations, I suspect Mozilla's tests need some work to reproduce working conditions.

"Well unless you expect someone to manually trace through every possible code path in the source code to look for the bug"

There are much easier ways to find performance problems that are difficult to reproduce than that.

"When given a choice between spending a month tracking down 1 hard to reproduce bug and actually fixing 50 easily reproducable bugs the 50 will win nearly every time."

Yes, thats a fundemental fault with open source software.

">Disregarding them on the assumption that the people reporting them are just making up lies about the product you know to be perfect isn't going to help anyone.
I don't think anyone's saying that. "

You must be new here. Welcome to the world of slashdot.

" Images do actually take up a lot of memory - particularly since the browser probably holds a reference to the uncompressed bitmap, not the original image, so if you've got a lot of images open on a lot of tabs, you _will_ use a lot of memory. It's also possible that when that memory is released it is not actually reclaimed by the operating system untill such time as it's really needed, and depending on how you're measuring the memory usage of an application, it might appear that the memory has not been freed. That's what I mean by having a different understanding of what a leak is."

Who said it had to be a memory leak? Its perfectly possible the browser has just become too bloated and ends up using too much memory on its own. That doesn't make it any less of a problem.

Re:least favorite feature..the arrows on the tab b

[Kelson]

The only new feature I'd like to turn off is the change in how tabs are displayed after 13 tabs have been opened. I don't like having to scroll.

Fortunately, there's a drop-down list at the far right that shows all open tabs. It's a bit easier to navigate than scrolling the tab bar.

Re:Wtf! Advertising on the download page?

[jonasj]

No, Mozilla is forcing them to either change the name, or do the same thing every other distro is doing, which is to run their patches by Mozilla first. Debian is *choosing* to change the name. Which is okay.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[nwbvt]

Well, yes and no. Yes, there are some noted areas where JavsScript VMs leak memory, but its still possible for sites to leak it on their own, especially considering how common it is to leave a page up without closing the browser window.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[Chosen Reject]

What do you use a browser for anyway? The only extension I ever install is Adblock and I consier Firefox a very good everyday browser even without that. Thats' probably because I use it everyday. I can go to a website, I can view that website, I can click links. Honestly, what else is there?

Look of tabs is inconsistent & ugly

[Tillmann]

Hi,

if I wanted tabs/buttons to be shaded and round-edged, then I would have selected a GTK theme with these features.

But I haven't, and APPLICATIONS SHOULD RESPECT THAT!!!

Why does Firefox 2.0rc2 use its own look & feel for the tabs, instead of respecting the theme that is currently set in the desktop environment (like Firefox 1.X did)? The tabs look ugly and don't match other GTK apps at all.

Also, nuisances that have been present for quite a while still aren't taken care of. E.g. after doing a search via the search field, the field doesn't auto-clear itself - so you can't just do another search later by pressing the middle mouse button in the search field to paste a keyword. Instead, you have to clear the field manually.

bye,
Till

Re:Wtf! Advertising on the download page?

[rhavenn]

You misunderstand me. I have no problem with Debian sticking to their guns and I applaud them for doing so. However, to use your analogy, they really need to make an ammendment to their constitution. Firefox is gaining a brand and some recognition as a brand. The last thing Mozilla wants to do is have people install a Debian tweaked Firefox, still labeled as Firefox, and then have things not work right even though they work 100% correctly in the Mozilla version. Since probably the biggest, newb friendly distro is Ubuntu this could really shoot Linux in the foot.

A scenario: Newb user comes over from Windows and wants to try out Linux. He loads Ubunutu and looks for Firefox..can't find it. Finally, he finds the debian version and then tries to install an extension or a plugin or something. Dogh, it doesn't work. Newb user gets frustrated with this shitty Linux and goes back to Windows. Of course, you'll say well he should RTFM or search forums until he finds the problem. Well, sorry..most people don't have the patience or know how to do that.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[Fred_A]

t is clearly only a "on a small percentage of Windows, Mac, and Linux computers" that this problem occurs. The people who are not using those computers don't see any problem.

Are you saying we should run OS/2 ?

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[rapidweather]

I'm using RC1 now on Rapidweather Remaster of Knoppix Linux on a dual 200 mmx box with 256 MB of RAM. Seems ok to me, I'll get over to my cable modem box today and download RC2 and give it a try.
I use a "persistent home directory" knoppix.img for ~/, and on this box it's 500 MB, so my RAM does not change, it's at 556 K, (1%) according to "df". The knoppix.img is on /dev/hdb7, and the OS itself is on /dev/hdd7.
I don't have to use the CD to boot, have a loadlin setup using a MSDOS menu. My remaster uses the 2.4 kernel, so it runs well on older boxes. I have loaded my remaster up with fonts, so the web pages look better than they do in Opera or Firefox running on Windows XP, on the same machine. The "oem" knoppix 3.4 had so-so fonts, not acceptable to me. I symlink to the ~/.fonts.cache-1, so it does not use any ~/ ram to speak of. It's 304.70 KB, so you can see why I would want to symlink it.
I can run the remaster directly off the CD, with no real problems, it is just a little slower to start up applications, as they have to decompress off the CD first in typical knoppix style. 7200 RPM hard drives offer a boost, and since they are there, why not use them.

I don't see any reason why I can't put RC2 in the CD, unless they have somehow fowled something up, over RC1, which I doubt. I do have Opera 9.02, and Flock, which is based on the stable Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.6.
I pre-configure all three browsers in the CD, mainly pointing them to a built-in home page like this one. The users wind up in less of a "walled garden" with a page like that, or at least I have tried to make it so.

I do have RC1 running the NoScript extension, does give one the impression, at least, that you are keeping the bad javascripts out, but it winds up being a nuisance sometimes, having to enable js on sites.

With the knoppix.img setup for ~/ I can easily add something like Google Earth, which I run on a P4 HT with 1GB RAM.

About "top", I have been up nearly an hour, and I have zero swap used, and 26484KB free. (This is a 256 MB box)
It's probably the 2.4 kernel that allows me to have these numbers. Some of the 2.2 kernel machines I have do even better, but, they will not run the new browsers, either.

-- Rapidweather

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Millenniumman]

What you said makes little sense. You can port FireFox to any operating system you want. You just can't claim it to be Mozilla's project, which calling it Firefox effectively does.

Would you like it if someone made a virus and advertised it is being yours, and most users would never learn that it wasn't?

It's not a design issue

[CritterNYC]

It's a human issue. It's a social hack... not a technical one. These sites aren't being blocked because they'll crash the browser. Or install a worm. Or anything along those lines. They're being blocked because they're fake sites designed to trick people into revealing their personal information (like credit card numbers, passwords etc). Remember the PAYPAI.com site incident for instance? They would send out emails masquerading as paypal.com and have the site URL written in lowercase except for the final character, which was uppercase. Lots of people were tricked into going there. Even if they got to the browser and the browser lowercased it to look like paypai.com, lots of people simply missed it. So, technically, there was nothing wrong with the site. It didn't hack the browser. It even used valid HTML. But it was designed to trick the end user into revealing personal details. And it worked. The blacklist is designed to index sites like this and notify the user when they visit one.

This isn't something you could really design in. Not without changing internet protocols. There's only a certain amount of change you can affect when you're just the browser. And a phishing blacklist makes perfect sense. And, yes, it should be enabled by default. You, as a more technical user, are of course free to disable it. So, how is this even an issue for you?

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[cortana]

Debian's Firefox package is 99% Mozilla's product; it just has a few patches that make it run better on the Debian operating system. Debian have never claimed otherwise; and mozilla.org never had a problem with the practice.

I wish mozilla.com would allocate some more resources to maintaining the 'Linux' port of Firefox (and their other programs) so that Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and othes wouldn't have to apply so many patches themselves in the first place! But sadly, it appears that mozilla.com would rather protect their valuable intellectual property, even if it means they bite the hand that feeds them in the process.

By the way, comparing the work done by the maintainers of the Debian package to that of virus writers makes you appear either clueless or insulting. Which do you prefer?

Re:least favorite feature..the arrows on the tab b

[buswolley]

What the fuck are you talking about? I am specifically talking about the scrolling to and from tabs placed off screen. I like the older version of Firefox that let me open many tabs, and each tab stays on screen. After that, I got a reply that told me that I do not have to use the radio button on the side to do this scrolling. Instead, I can use the scroll wheel while my mouse pointer is held over the tab bar. This knowledge does make this feature more livable, it has not changed my preference for the 1.5 version of tabs.

Furthermore, the issue of the x button on each tab is a bit overblown. It does make it easier to close a tab. It does use more space. Then again, Firefox doesn't compress the tab as much as the should, persisting on at least a full word length.

I think that the best way to get around this issue is to allow more structure. Perhaps an ability to create a tree and leaf mapping of related tabs. Or perhaps the ability to select multiple tabs and send those to a new window.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[trifish]

By your logic I could now say that the link to the Opera forum leads to a "fabricated" post.

I just wonder why I never read about IE6/Opera hogging CPU and memory but I read it about Firefox all the time. Just makes me wonder.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions

This is interesting. Why isn't Mozilla warning users about these extensions (assuming the bugs are offically confirmed)? I do understand they have user ratings on the extension pages and the page above. But, wouldn't a bright and bold warning on the respective extension pages do good in keeping people away from installing these? When people talk about memory leaks and other nasty stuff due to poorly written extensions, they obviously see it as Firefox's (or Mozilla's) problem. Mozilla should have to do something about this before it's (new found) popular image gets tarnished. Something like having a separate officially endorsed set of *gold* extensions might help, requiring extensions to pass some stringent review process in order make it to this elite list. I'm seeing too much crap in the extensions page these days and to an average Joe, every extension in the official mozilla page is as good as another.

First Firefox release that leaves me Blah

[PingXao]

I love Firefox and have used it exclusively (and Mozilla before that and Netscape before that) for over a decade. This 2.0 release of Firefox is leaving me very un-blown away.

1. Visual Refresh - so what?
2. Phishing protection - Good for "ordinary users", does nothing for me.
3. Enhanced search - I can already search pretty well across the internet, so this is bloat.
4. Tabbed browsing - each tab has its own 'x' close button? I call that a step backwards.
5. Resume brosing session - who cares?
6. Web feeds - the ONLY feature I might find useful
7. Inline spell chacking - Many people will benefit from this obviously, but not me, so it's nothing but bloat as far as I'm concerned.

There's more, but you get the idea. I am unimpressed by the new features of Firefox 2.0.

Re:First Firefox release that leaves me Blah

[Anonymous Coward]

"7. Inline spell chacking - Many people will benefit from this obviously, but not me, so it's nothing but bloat as far as I'm concerned."

That had to be on purpose. Right?

More than a day?

[nova_ostrich]

Actually, I've noticed that the people who complain the most about Firefox's memory usage seem to be the folks that just leave the browser open all the time. I almost never see memory usage go above 80MB, but I tend to close my browser when I'm done with a task. If I'm leaving the computer for a while, I'll close the browser. If I'm finished looking up some API function while I'm at work, I'll close it.

My browser is probably never open more than a couple hours at a time. I don't mind waiting the second it takes to start up, but I have a feeling there are a lot of folks that would rather just leave it open. Thus, I've thought you guys are nuts for complaining about memory problems that I never see. Now, I guess I understand.

I still don't get this "bloat" thing...

[Miseph]

Seriously, what are you people doing that Firefox is eating so much system resources?

I'm running several optional extensions all the time, and regardless of how long I use Firefox or what I browse, I never see the problems some of you are reporting, not even close. Maybe it's because I mainly use Win2k, and the 'memory leak" issue is mainly a Linux thing, but somehow I doubt that memory management in Windows is better for any specific application at any time than the Linux equivalent.

And yes, I periodically do things like leave 5-10 tabs open in each of 1-5 instances of Firefox with each tab displaying svereal high resoultion photos, reams of text, and wacky formatting and CSS effects. I still don't see any problems with bloat. Ever.

I'm not saying that others' problems don't exist, I'm sure they do. I'm just saying that it doesn't sound anything at all like my own experiences with Firefox. Believe me, if I did, I wouldn't be using it at all. I'm only running 384 MB of RAM on a 5-6 year old computer... For soemthing to take up 2 GB of memory is not just unacceptable, but completely impossible. Thankfully, Firefox only uses between 30-100 MB for me. Guess I'm just lucky or something.

As for Opera... I'm not a fan. The Opera UI and I don't work well together, and I'm not of the opinion that my webbrowser should have much of a learning curve. Maybe if I ran into more rendering problems I'd work through it, but I don't, and the ones I do see are always because some idiot decided to make a web app that only runs in IE, and Opera doesn't exactly fix that (though the IE Tab extension does). There's nothing really wrong with it, and I tend to refer people to it as well as Firefox if they use IE, but not ever likely to use it myself.

nothing wrong with bloat

[sentientbrendan]

outside of slashdot, people often enough call bloat "features." If developers add features to an application that lots of people want, that's a good thing. In that sense, there is no software that is getting less bloated i.e. removing features from every version.

What I would like to see changed about firefox is a smaller memory footprint, faster loading times, and a removal of that freeze up that happens when a download starts. In my mind, these things are the real bloat, and they can't be solved by just removing the anti fishing system or whatever. The mozilla guys need to do some serious profiling on firefox and figure out why they are using so much fricken time and space.

They should probably also consider rewriting firefox so that it doesn't use *javascript*, and thus require the javascript runtime to be constantly running, for all of its GUI components. XUL, xpcom and whatnot seem to be pet projects of the mozilla team. They need to take a hard look at those features and ask (1) whether anyone outside of mozilla will ever use them (certainly no one is now, and they've been around for a while) and (2) are they creating a lot of overhead in firefox.

Firefox was originally designed to be a faster lighter mozilla, but they still have a long way to go on that front. My concern is that the mozilla team has gotten complacent with the performance improvements that they have so far. Many people on windows are sticking with IE 6 with all of its problems just because they don't have to wait for it to load on windows (granted, that's because they are cheating by preloading it, but to the user that's still relatively better).

Re:nothing wrong with bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a software that is removing features from every version. It is called GNOME :(

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[aichpvee]

Konqueror is neither viable as a renderer or as a web browser. Which is too bad, because I'd really like to see it be an option. It doesn't render properly most pages that I use regularly (this is not an exaggeration). It's rather feature incomplete as a full web browser, and where it has the features they feel flaky. It suffers a lot from the microsoft-copying lunacy of trying to shoehorn a web browser and file browser into a single application. I don't really use Konq as a file browser (gui file browsing isn't very useful for me) it hurts a lot as a web browser from this duality. And then everything about it just feels flaky.

So yes, Konqueror is an alternative. It is not however viable for every day use and very likely never will be.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[aichpvee]

You assume too much. Like, for starters, that Firefox isn't missing features that are basically impossible to implement as an extension without decreasing performance significantly. A clean copy of Firefox is real fast and smooth, but it's not useable.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox isn't a useable browser without extensions

I respectfully disagree. As a somewhat long time Firefox user (I started using this browser with Firebird 0.6), I have yet to come across a single extension that I either want or need in order to use Firefox every single day at home as well as at work.

Performance here is perfectly fine and I'd rather not have the functions of these extensions built in if there is a chance that it would affect performance even slightly. It is better that the extension developers do a better job of avoiding memory leaks in their extensions for those who may use them.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[aichpvee]

Interface. If using crappy interfaces doesn't bother you, I guess that's fine. But I've been using computers for way too long to deal with crap when I don't have to. This is the primary reason I don't use windows, mac, gnome, or anything else similar. As the application that I use most I don't think it's at all unreasonable to be particular about the functioning of a web browser.

These are the features I can't really do without, though I run a few other extensions that I could live without but are somewhat useful (and not listed below):

- Mouse gesture, which should have been built-in a LONG time ago.
- aspell, will be irrelevent if I ever upgrade to Firefox2, which isn't looking likely any time soon.
- Menu Editor, because the interface clutter is annoying and wastes my screen space.
- SessionSaver, again this should have been built-in a long, long time ago.
- All-in-One sidebar, this is basically similar to Opera's sidebar and removes a lot of popping up windows (which I hate) and generally streamlines the interface. I'm using a very old version of it because I don't like the changes that were made after 0.5.6.
- Tab Clicking Options, because the default way of dealing with tabs in Firefox is ridiculous.
- Adblock and Flashblock, obviously.

So I guess I low-balled a bit at half a dozen.

Do you understand Perl6?

[SanityInAnarchy]

I'll bet that by the time you make a reasonably standard JavaScript toolkit for local apps -- as in, NOT AJAX -- Ruby, which is already at least as powerful, will probably have a decent VM, and be approaching reasonably fast. Python and Perl will have moved on.

If, by that time, we have a reasonably working Perl6, it will absolutely smoke anything JavaScript can do -- I'd want to be able to embed Perl6 in AJAX programs. Remember, the Perl6 guys were well aware of JavaScript, and many other languages and paradigms, when they started designing. This means Perl6 will be more powerful than JavaScript, but it will also be faster, and we'll still have CPAN.

making firefox look bad ...?

[pbhj]

>>> "trying to make Firefox look bad"

Nice flame.

I've been using Firefox since it was Phoenix and advocating it as the best browser for probably a couple of years. About 4 months ago I went looking for another browser as I've had these memory problems on both Linux and WindowsXP. I've tried the fixes suggested but they don't seem to do anything on either of my systems.

The thing is that my use of Firefox is now ingrained. I'm using Konqueror on Linux quite a bit, Op9 occassionally, but still "teh Fox" gets alot of use until it fills my entire RAM up and dies.

I've not tried the most recent v2 release as v2 didn't help a couple of months back.

Guess I'm just trying to make FF look bad though.

where did microsummaries come from

[pbhj]

I'm curious, I've not heard of rel="microsummary" (is that bad, I'm a part-time web developer!??) before. Is this new. It seems that the tag is becoming a dumping point for new ideas.

I don't like the comment at http://wiki.mozilla.org/Microsummaries

>>> "The microsummary generator dialect and the use of the <link rel> element to specify microsummaries should be standardized by the appropriate bodies, which may include the microformats group and the WHATWG."

_should_ be standardised? Has there been an RFC for this with efforts to get comments from other browser writers? (Link please, no pun intended).

What will the effect be on servers if all browser bookmarks use this system?

I got my UK site up to 10.9%, but with a promo

[rklrkl]

I run an unofficial UK lottery site at http://lottery.merseyworld.com/ which again will probably have a fairly wide demographic and although Firefox usage (slightly boosted by a JavaScript promo link I put in at the bottom of pages) has now reached its highest ever (10.9%), it's been there for months and isn't rising any more.

You suspect that the honeymoon period is now over and it's not picking up large number of new converts any more (and Firefox 2 isn't a big enough leap to change that, IMHO - it's not until Firefox 3 that we'll see another usage spike I suspect). Still, if it stays above 10%, at least Web designers can't ignore it - we *need* a rival to IE that has such a level of market share otherwise the Web will be balkanised as a "works best in Windows/IE" like it was before Mozilla and then Firefox came along.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[bunratty]

By your logic I could now say that the link to the Opera forum leads to a "fabricated" post.

No, by linking to the post, that proves it's real and not fabricated. If I said it existed without such a post, that would be fabricating it. Need a dictionary, huh?

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[James Fleming]

This is nothing more than yet another instance of fabricated bad news about Firefox. Of course Opera has problems like this. You can browse around the Opera forums and find instances of Opera hogging memory and CPU. And yet no one says Opera is a memory or CPU hog. Go figure.

I think this is just a popularity thing - I mean, if there was many people using Opera as Firefox, we would probably have as many people bitching about whatever memory management issues, bugs or rendering problems it has. If everyone used Firefox, perhaps we would even see a "Spread IE" campaign emerging on the internet.

Personally though, I don't see that memory management is too much of a problem. I don't think I've ever had any browser use up so much memory as to interfere with the operation of other programs.

And as a small offtopic: I use SeaMonkey most of the time. I like it, too.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[trifish]

It was you who said that the "news" about Firefox were fabricated. I'm telling you what's real: I've never come across a post/article saying that Opera or IE6 hog CPU or RAM, but I keep reading that Firefox is a CPU and RAM hogger. This striking difference is real, and not fabricated news. If the "bug" is hard to reproduce, it suggests sloppy and low-quality code (in such cases it's often better to dump the code completely and start from scratch).

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[pabs]

Swap is for unused pages of RAM. If an application isn't using a particular chunk of memory, then there's no reason to keep it in memory. The disk cache, on the other hand, reduces the delay associated with disk activity by caching the contents of recently read files and a handful of other tricks. Here's an example of the disk cache in action:

pabs@vault:/store/mythtv> du -sh 1066*.avi
360M 1066_20060327233000_20060328000000-divx.avi
pabs@ vault:/store/mythtv> time dd if=1066*.avi of=/dev/null bs=4096
91986+1 records in
91986+1 records out
376775134 bytes transferred in 3.864956 seconds (97484976 bytes/sec)

real 0m3.883s
user 0m0.032s
sys 0m0.468s
pabs@vault:/store/mythtv> time dd if=1066*.avi of=/dev/null bs=4096
91986+1 records in
91986+1 records out
376775134 bytes transferred in 1.744253 seconds (216009442 bytes/sec)

real 0m1.758s
user 0m0.032s
sys 0m0.304s

97.5mb/s without the disk cache versus 216mb/s with the disk cache.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[rapidweather]

This is an update to my post above. I am now running RC2 as a temporary install, and it seems just fine. (This is a livecd linux)

For those knoppix fans, you have to leave out your "home=scan" in your boot cheatcodes to be able to tar -xvf the Firefox downloaded file. Then, after you get a ~/firefox (not the ~/.mozilla) just copy it to a spare hard drive partition, and then reboot, now using your "knoppix.img" with "home=scan".
Next, copy the ~/firefox to ~/ so it will be included in your knoppix.img. You may change the owner/group to knoppix.knoppix for all of ~/firefox.
Last, make a menu entry or desktop icon for RC2 in place of the Mozilla Firefox that you had.
Mine is:

prog "Mozilla Firefox 2.0 RC2" /usr/local/firefox/icons/mozicon16.xpm rxvt -iconic -rv -fb 10x20 -geometry 70x10+20+12 -cr yellow -T "Firefox" -e /home/knoppix/firefox/firefox

That is for the IceWM toolbar icon in Rapidweather Remaster of Knoppix Linux.

There are some screenshots below showing a prior Firefox running in IceWM, here is one that shows the toolbar.
Now, when you set up the browser the way you want, the "persistent home directory" knoppix.img will keep your changes from bootup to bootup.
I put the bookmarks with the 9 RSS feeds in ~/firefox so RC2 has them also.

This has been a description of how to temporarily install RC2, when a "knoppix.img" is being used. (This box has a 200 MB one., so about 53% of that is being used for the new Firefox, and Google Earth, both temporary "installs".)

Now I am going to enjoy using Mozilla Firefox 2.0 RC2 for the rest of the evening.

-- Rapidweather
 

Opera's Business Model

[Kelson]

When Netscape started dying, people didn't have a lot of choice for browsers. There was Internet Explorer (cost: $0) and Opera (cost: annoying ads).

Depends on when you think Netscape started dying. At the time I gave up on Netscape Communicator, Opera was still 30-day trialware, with a cost of $39. (Fortunately I still qualified for the student discount at the time.) The ad-supported mode didn't appear until version 5, in December 2000.

I think that if Opera had had a non-ad, basic freeware version, they would probably have captured a lot of the people who now use Firefox. And the ad-version could very well hang over them in the minds of some people.

I'll definitely agree with that. The only problem is that I don't think there was another business model in place at the time that would have enabled them to sink money into a free product. IE had Microsoft's entire software empire. Netscape had AOL/Time Warner's media empire. Opera had... Opera. They had some versions of their embedded browser at the time, but that would've been it. The deals with search engine placement that fuel both Opera and Mozilla these days probably wouldn't have ben viable at the time.

Re:Opera's Business Model

[ClamIAm]

I'll definitely agree with that. The only problem is that I don't think there was another business model in place at the time that would have enabled them to sink money into a free product.

Actually this kind of ties into my point about Firefox. The hype and buzz they generated combined with the search deal with Google created a neat little loop that provided more funding for Mozilla, thus allowing further development, buzz, and marketing.

Good point, servers are not included.

[Kadin2048]

This is true. When I made my original comment, I was thinking only of end-user desktop systems, not really of servers. I suppose you could make the same "OS exception" with any machine that's more or less dedicated to a particular purpose or application. E.g., if you had a machine that was nothing but a webserver, you would want Apache to use all the resources on the machine in order to produce maximum performance. Any system that has one function that is much more important than anything else, would want to be much more aggressive in apportioning resources to that application, than a normal multipurpose desktop would be.

Mod parent as troll

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullshit. Either you installed on top of a beta, or you are just lying out of your fucking ass troll. I haven't had a single problem with the so-called 'memory issues' you and the rest of the trolls have brought up. This is in both Windows and Linux, even with flash.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[14CharUsername]

I have no extensions installed and only the flash plugin.

Ummm.... have you considered it may actually be flash that's causing the the problem?

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Millenniumman]

First of all, they aren't protecting intellectual property. They are protecting their reputation.

I am not comparing the work of the Debian maintainers to that of virus writers. But if Mozilla let anyone using their trademarks, they could be thought responsible for something that wasn't theirs.

Maybe they should make an exception for Debian, as they obviously are only trying to improve the software. But they would still be in the position of being responsible for something that isn't theirs.

Detach Tab option?

[Trogre]

I'm a little disappointed that there isn't yet a "detach" option in the context menu for each tab.

I like to use one window per topic I'm working on and if one tab leads to another topic I want to look at in more detail it would be nice to just detach that tab to a separate window rather that copy the URL, hit CTRL-N and middle-click in the new window.

I notice that both Konqueror and Konsole have had this functionality for some time.

Re:Detach Tab option?

[Auxbuss]

I work this way too.

My solution is via the Tab Mix Plus extension. Go to Options/Mouse/Mouse clicking and set one of middle-click, double click, etc. to Duplicates the tab in a new window

I use Double click on a tab duplicates the tab in a new window.

Re:Detach Tab option?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a little disappointed that there isn't yet a "detach" option in the context menu for each tab.

<obligatory> Opera has had a similar feature for many, many years (just drag the tab outside the main window, it will get detached), so you can expect it marketed as yet another Firefox invention in 2008, just like it always happens. </obligatory>

Re:Detach Tab option?

[alib001]

I thought that would be a logical addition.

IE7 has it. You just click and drag the tab and an insertion cursor appears. Works like you'd expect.

There's plenty of scope for extending the functionality of the tabs. I'd like to have the ability to split the main window into multiple views by dragging a tab down (or to one side). I do a lot of cross referencing so being able to concurrently read from two or more documents would be neat. Sadly, there seems to be less, what I'd call, "pure browsing" innovation and more bolt-on features these days.

BTW: IE7 also does this "Quick Tabs" thing - multiple tabs are represented as thumbnails in their own tab. It's handy when you have a lot of tabs open with similar titles to be able to select the one you want by using a visual preview. I hope there's a FF equivalent or something similar in the works.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[ajs]

The answer to your problem has been provided, and yet you continue to make vague assertions about the quality of Firefox that boil down to your preference. Why?

If these issues are of such dire concern to you that you can't browse the Web with Firefox, then move along. Perhaps you'll enjoy Opera or IE or even links. Don't just whine about Firefox, either use something else or fix it. You have the source, you can patch your version if you like. Personally, I've found nothing in current Firefox to complain about. Out of the box, it's excellent, and I use a few extensions (such as FlashBlock, Adblock and Forecastfox Enhnaced) which make it even better.

It will be nice to have built-in spell-checking in version 2. That's probably my biggest desire right now. Other than that, I think Firefox does everything I could want from a browser.

viva la nightly's

[Skeith]

If firefox speed up their release cycle a little bit then maybe they could catch up to Opera. The nightly builds of firefox are a huge leap forward from 2.0, they are much more stable, faster, and use less memory. I'm very impressed with the memory usage improvement, with 8 tabs open (and browsing extensively in those tabs) I'm only seeing 45-50mb memory usage. Opera clocks in at 33mb with no browsing with the same windows open.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

Hard to rerpoduce bugs may suggest low-quality underlying code.

And it may suggest stupid users who are creating bug reports out of thin air.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian's Firefox package is 99% Mozilla's product

99% is not 100%. If you knew the first thing about software development, you'd know that a minor change can have disasterous results. You've got to be quite the arrogant prick to argue that Mozilla doesn't have the right to protect their brand by ensuring that they have control over the product that goes out with their name on it.

I wish mozilla.com would allocate some more resources to maintaining the 'Linux' port of Firefox (and their other programs) so that Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and othes wouldn't have to apply so many patches themselves in the first place! But sadly, it appears that mozilla.com would rather protect their valuable intellectual property, even if it means they bite the hand that feeds them in the process.

No, it appears that they'd prefer to work with such distros as partners. It's not a hardship to ask somebody who wants to make a change to FF to run it by Mozilla for approval and inclusion into the official product.

By the way, comparing the work done by the maintainers of the Debian package to that of virus writers makes you appear either clueless or insulting. Which do you prefer?

Not recognizing that both changes could result in a security disaster that tarnishes Mozilla's reputation makes you appear as a clueless dipshit or...a... clueless dipshit.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wonder why I never read about IE6/Opera hogging CPU and memory but I read it about Firefox all the time. Just makes me wonder.

IE: a commercial interest of Microsoft, who benefit when their competition look bad. Main competition: Firefox.
Opera: a commercial interest of Opera, who benefit when their competition look bad. Main competition: Firefox.
Firefox: free, no commercial interests involved.

Hmmmmmm.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[Haeleth]

(uhhh, I won't explain what kind of "image intensive sites" I'm talking about here, you can figure it out I'm sure). :)

Too easy.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[trifish]

> Firefox: free, no commercial interests involved.

You are kidding right? Google pays milions monthly to the Mozilla Corp for the search querries coming from the in-built search box in the Firefox GUI (top right corner). Why do you think Mozilla Foundation wasn't enough? Why did they need to establish the Mozilla Corporation if "commercial interests are involved"? They pretty much fooled you.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[trifish]

And BTW, I fail to see what commercial interests are there in the freeware IE6.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

Konq is probably the best rendering browser available on Linux. Especially since the KTeam backported Apple's improvements to khtml vis a vis CSS rendering.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[HeroreV]

I was referring to the program that is called Firefox, not the name "Firefox" itself. You of course knew that, but pretended not to.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[glittalogik]

- SessionSaver, again this should have been built-in a long, long time ago.
- Tab Clicking Options, because the default way of dealing with tabs in Firefox is ridiculous.

These two can be consolidated at least, Tab Mix Plus takes care of both of them quite nicely for me. Requires some config on first install, but since then I've never had a problem with it.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[glittalogik]

I think GP meant that the post being linked to may have been troll, as opposed to nonexistent.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions - NOT!

[richlv]

"This is without any plugins/extensions installed except flash."

and there's your keyword.
i had opera grow memory usage overnight and almost always - over weekend. when i removed flash plugin, it just never had the problem. it was so bad that i had to do a cold reboot of the machine (note, this is linux...).
it was enough to enable flash plugin once, and that would almost guarantee unusable machine after some time.

even though problem is less severe with latest flash plugin version (no machine lockups so far), i still prefer keeping plugins disabled, as there have been some weird memory usage increases while having it enabled.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[richlv]

i've seen quite often "no plugins installed". after some questions - "oooh, i had flash installed, but that doesn't count".

i've had flash bring whole computer to knees in opera (linux).
so, the first question would be "REALLY no plugins ? and yes, flash counts"

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[richlv]

i've heard stories that firefox developers mostly favor windows, and this shows in product quality on linux...
complaints included both performance and functionality (configurability) problems, compared to windows versions.

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[bit01]

This striking difference is real, and not fabricated news.

Just because it's repeated doesn't mean it's not fabricated. Marketers love meaningless repetition.

---

New game: Spot the lying astroturfer on /.!

Re: Memory leaks in extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

If you compare IE6, Opera, and Firefox, then Firefox is obviously the least stable and the slowest one. The Firefox ad in NYTimes was the biggest scam in the history of open source.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[bit01]

"When given a choice between spending a month tracking down 1 hard to reproduce bug and actually fixing 50 easily reproducable bugs the 50 will win nearly every time."

Yes, thats a fundemental fault with open source software.

Bigot. That's a fundamental fault with all software.

---

Paid marketers are the worst zealots.

Re:Firefox Portable 2.0 RC2: Test Without Installi

[jmv]

How long do you think before it becomes Iceweasel Portable?

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[nwbvt]

So I'm a bigot I don't drink the OSS Kool-Aid? Do you even know what a bigot is?

Commericial software developers are paid to work on the problems customers complain about the most. Thus they get prioritized higher than easy bugs that no one really cares about. Trust me, I work for a major software company (no, not Microsoft, one that is much more open source friendly). When a major customer starts escalating some issue, we are expected to drop everything else we are doing and work on that issue 24/7. Get a job yourself and maybe you'd learn that.

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[bit01]

So I'm a bigot I don't drink the OSS Kool-Aid? Do you even know what a bigot is?

No, you're a bigot in this instance because you've made an accusation that applies equally to all software as if it applies only to open source. Nothing to do with whether you prefer closed or open source.

Commercial software developers are paid to work on the problems customers complain about the most.

Nope, they're paid to work on problems that cost the vendor the most, usually those that prevent the next sale. That's not the same thing.

Thus they get prioritized higher than easy bugs that no one really cares about. Trust me, I work for a major software company (no, not Microsoft, one that is much more open source friendly). When a major customer starts escalating some issue, we are expected to drop everything else we are doing and work on that issue 24/7. Get a job yourself and maybe you'd learn that.

Nonsense. I've been on the vendor and customer end of hundreds of software maintenance contracts for major companies with hundreds of incidents logged. The reality is that while hardware maintenance contracts are sometimes worth the money, vendor software maintenance contracts are an almost complete waste of time and money.

Either the bug is considered to be a feature request and ignored, or the vendor provides a useless work around, or they say it'll be in the next major release in many months time. Almost never an actual solution unless they happened to be working on it at the time for the next release.

Not surprising since software maintenance costs money and like any cost vendors try to minimise it, particularly since it's after the sale has been made. Small companies are sometimes more responsive but that's the exception not the rule.

At least with open source you have the option of paying a third party to do the work for you. With an uncooperative closed source vendor that option does not exist.

---

Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.

Re: That has got to be the most ignorant shit...

[Senzei]

Sorry, trying to make Firefox look bad hasn't worked in the past and it won't work now.

You're basically saying, "Even things such as massive memory management issues can't make Firefox look bad, and that, of course, is by virtue of its being Firefox." That's some type of logical flaw, but I forget which one it is.

...that would be your "logical flaw" in assuming that the GP was stating that nothing can make Firefox look bad, instead of his real statement that baseless attempts to make Firefox look bad don't work.

Unless you were trying to categorize that as a "logical fallacy", in which case the only thing that comes to mind is a tautology (Firefox is good because it is Firefox).

Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA

[nwbvt]

First of all, if you were right, that would still not make me a bigot. You, on the other hand, with your mindless aversion to differing points of view on the open source vs commericial software debate, are fairly close.

Second, you getting screwed over a few times is far from proof that problems that are hard to fix are given low priorities. All it proves is that problems that are hard to fix are hard to fix (and you are not very good at negotiating software contracts). In fact, your getting a response indicates that they did prioritize it fairly high, just that after an initial investigation they determined that a full fix would cause more problems than it would solve. High priorities do not guarentee results.

Mozilla team losing focus!

[xk0der]

Mozilla team is losing focus!

The lean and mean broswer is becoming fat and bad.

Size does matter, leaner the better. They should leave out extra features as plugins.

At least, this is what I think.

- xk0der
Xtreme K0ding