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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
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.'"
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.