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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."
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?
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.
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.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
{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.
... read/write local files, and so on.
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
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). :)
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
. ~/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.
Listen to my music.
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
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.