Slashdot Mirror
Firefox Going the Big and Bloated IE Way?
abhinav_pc writes "Wired is carrying an article pondering whether Firefox has become big and bloated, much like IE. As the browser's popularity has risen, the interest in cramming more features into the product has as well. Slowdowns and feature creep have some users asking for a return to the days of the 'slim and sexy' Firefox. 'Firefox's page-cache mechanism, for example, introduced in version 1.5, stores the last eight visited pages in the computer's memory. Caching pages in memory allows faster back browsing, but it can also leave a lot less memory for other applications to use. Less available RAM equals a less-responsive computer. Firefox addresses this issue somewhat, setting the default cache lower on computers with less than a gigabyte of RAM. Though the jury is still out on where the perfect balance between too many and too few features lies, one truth is apparent: The new web is pushing our browsers to the limit.'"
I'm running 3/4 of a gig, and I've never had Firefox crash. And I have BOINC running all the time. My CPU is spinning pretty high all the time, and I tend to have a good bit of my RAM being used all the time. So I don't know what you're doing wrong dude.
Geeks strike again 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Ignoring the poor grammar for a moment: "Less available RAM equals a less-responsive computer" is a bit simplistic. Unused memory is wasted memory, this is similar to the arguments about top(1) on Linux reporting all your memory being used in buffers etc.
I spend all day^H^H^H^H^H^H^H a few momentes when I would not otherwise be productive, pimping my music round myspace (surely the biggest resource hog on the net) and firefox holds up fine on my 256MB Thinkpad (running ubuntu).
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
A quick look finds the option to turn off the cache:
browse to about:config
search for the browser.cache.memory.enable setting
set it to false
restart the browser
On my machine, that lowers the memory footprint from 125MB to just under 50MB.
Sure, for geeks. But if we want people to stop using IE we must provide a credible alternative.
There should definitely be an option to tell Firefox to use less than n megabytes of memory, and let firefox figure it out, instead of setting the memory limit through the number of undo levels per tab.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
i use opera as my primary browser, and haven't had it crash on any flashes ever, although getting shockwave to work appears to be hard (due to a bad installer from adobe... i haven't bothered to get it to work yet, but from what i heard, i'd have to install firefox to get shockwave into opera -_-)
all in all i love it as a primary browser, sometimes i encounter an incompatible site, and then i switch to IE because i know it's a site i can thrust, and otherwise i work with opera, knowing that so few people use it that noone bothers to write exploits for it.
With 512MB, your system was probably already swapping, albeit not very much. OSX uses more RAM than there is any possible justification for, and I don't mean for buffers.
Windows XP is pretty much useless without at the very least 256MB RAM. Oh yeah, you can use it, but you're not going to do anything quickly. You will be constantly swapping. OSX is useless without at least 512MB RAM. You had 256MB too little ram to even play, let alone to have things be efficient.
Many of us would love it if the entire system were rewritten in tight, efficient code. I suggest you get right on that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Automatically storing files locally with contents and names that are defined remotely is a security risk. It would not be a security breach in itself, but it could create an opportunity to exploit unrelated bugs which would otherwise not be remotely exploitable.
That's got to be the dumbest argument I've heard in favor of Free/Open Source Software in a long time. Look at IBM's mainframes. I don't think you could get more closed or proprietary. Yet, many businesses have stuck by them due to the fact that backwards compatibility is never broken on those machines. Heck, you could run OS360 packages from the 70's on the modern zOS machines without a problem.
I think its just a bit extreme to say that no proprietary solution is practical in the long term. It depends on the application, the stability of the provider, and the relationship that you have with the provider. These three criteria apply whether the provider is the open-source community or a private company.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
The Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix project was started with the intention of being a lean browser based on the Gecko engine because the Mozilla Suite (now Seamonkey) was so massively bloated that it was easier to essentially start over than it would've been to attempt to slim down the main codebase. Firefox absolutely did not start out being more bloated than Seamonkey, otherwise it would've betrayed the entire purpose of its existence.
To be fair, the w3.org validator is emitting spurious errors from the very top after failing to find the DOCTYPE declaration. It's obviously trapped in lexical lala land.
For example, it fails to recognize the head tag here:
<!-- *** VERSION 2.0 CSS *** -->
<!-- *** ELS2MWEBNET0756 *** -->
<html>
<head>
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The original files that compose a site are not the problem. You can throw all the raw CSS you can find into memory and not make a dent. The problem is that Firefox is saving the final DOM that's parsed out of those original source files. That's a lot bigger than the raw data, and it's not something that "simple" websites do any better at.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
One of the principal goals of "Mozilla 2" is to subject the codebase to "deCOMtamination". Every instance of XPCOM than can be replaced with C++ exceptions will be, in order to reduce the ill effects of XPCOM that you outlined. Unfortunately, Mozilla 2 is estimated to be released as Firefox 4.0 in the first quarter of 2009--so at least a year and a half from now. This remedy may end up being too little too late.
Also see this kuro5hin story.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
Expecting Parallels to run smoothly with just 512MB of RAM is absurd in the first place. Even 1GB doesn't really cut it. If you're going to run VMs properly, you need 2GB of RAM or more.
Mac OS X won't run smoothly unless you have at least 1GB of RAM.