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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.'"
to totally rethink the browser? with broadband becoming more available could websites be built in a way that current browsers don't even let us imagine?
I used one of the very first phoenix builds. It impressed me because at the time i was using mozilla. Phoenix was literally just gecko + some ui and it was really really light and fast. There was no installer, no control panel (well it was blank), etc.
I'm very happy with firefox so far. I run half a dozen extensions to give me features like "session saving" etc. Ram usage is not too much of a concern with me. I would like it if the default was to not cache 8 pages back. And on disk cache should be fast enough to retrieve and render. 90% of the time i only go back 1 click anyways.
Firefox 3 is implementing major changes. Under the hood they are switching to garbage collection and cairo (vector rendering) just to name a few. Cairo is a great abstraction that hasn't fully realized its performance capability. I don't suppose glitz will be out anytime soon. The sql-lite bookmarking looks neat. Epiphany has something similar. But i must admit that i've fully switched to del.icio.us and the extension v1.5.29. That's quite fully featured and it syncs across computers.
The rss reading capability i do not like at all. That should be implemented as an extension. I prefer to use liferea. There are plenty of firefox features that should be implemented as extensions. That way you can disable them if you wish.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Whenever I clicked from one window to the other, I'd get the Spinning Pizza of Death for a minute or so while the other task's memory was paged in. I had to add another gig of RAM before I could switch windows quickly.
That made this old coder wanna cry. My first Mac had only 512 kilobytes (kilo - not mega) but that was enough for me to write GUI applications with.
Kids these days don't know how to write code.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
One think IE does right is a true file-for-file cache of what you have browsed.
Sometimes I like to troll thru my "Temporary Internet Files" folder and pick out a few bits for posterity. Especially large .swf or .flv files that I might have watched. The worst is when I watch one of those in FF, then want to grab the file... the easiest thing to do is to watch it AGAIN in IE so that I can go cache-picking later...
maybe it's just me.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
That's not what I'm saying at all. Right now, if you want to reduce the amount of memory Firefox uses to enable you to click the back button faster, you have to set a per-tab limit. This is dumb. I mean, it's nice to have that option, but for it to be the only means of controlling that limit? Stupid. There should be a nice fat "never use more than x megabytes of memory" option, and you can fill in the value of x. If the browser starts to run out of memory, it can prompt you and ask if you'd like to increase the memory limit. It needs to be as easy as possible for average users, who do not feel the same joy that you or I might when we figure out some computer-related esoterica. They just want to surf myspace and look at pictures of half-naked teenage girls.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You can save your specious arguments for an audience that will buy them. We don't have to review the source of all the programs we use to gain the "transparency" benefit of Open Source or Free Software. The idea is "many eyes", not "my eyes".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What's odd is that Opera packs all that stuff in and more (even a BitTorrent client!), and it's faster and more lightweight in terms of resource requirements. Even the download size is amazingly small. What is it that makes Firefox worse in that regard? The XUL stuff? Convoluted codebase making improvement difficult?
"Sufferin' succotash."
Actually if I am not mistaken Opera dedicates some RAM (used to deafault to 10MB) to cache already interpereted webpages (it used to at least). This allowed for BLAZING fast back and forward buttons because most of the CPUs work was done. My guess is that this was another feature FireFox was trying to implement after being inspired by Opera's many year earlier implementation.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The instance I'm typing this into (2.0.x) has been up for about three days. I have no idea how many tabs I've opened and pages loaded, but the task manager shows ~300MB mem and ~120MB VM usage. Keep in mind right now I only have two tabs open.
I suppose one could say the solution to the problem is restarting Firefox at least once a day... except that restarting a web browser seems about the stupidest thing ever.
Still, I put up with it because it's far better than IE6. I don't like Opera, so I don't have a lot of choice.
I agree -- halfway. Had early web browsers been strict about errors, we wouldn't have so much broken code out there, and cross-browser compatibility would be solely a matter of which features are supported -- not which set of error-correcting assumptions you expect.
On the other hand, the fact that those early versions of Mosaic, Netscape, IE, etc. would do something with broken code instead of refusing to display it meant that the barriers to entry were a lot lower. It vastly increased the pool of people who could create web pages, and the talent pool. Sure, some people have both artistic talent and programming ability, or have the resources to team up. But can you imagine a web built solely by programmers?
Eventually the authoring tools would have caught up. But I have to wonder if the web would be as big and diverse as it is now if it hadn't been able to pull in the casual author back in 1995.
Yes, we have crappily-coded sites like MySpace. On the other hand, 10 years ago the idea of visiting a website was inordinately dorky, and being online meant you were a social outcast. Now, it seems like being offline is considered freakish.
I have 10 tabs open, and Firefox 2.0.0.3 on XP Pro SP2 is eating 150 MB of RAM and running painfully slow at the very moment, especially when I try to do "File Menu > Save As" on a page, then the entire browser freezes for almost 90 seconds after I click the save button, even if it's just a text page -- I haven't browsed to any graphic intensive pages, just a lot of pages.
In the recent past, i've had 300MB memory usage on just 3 tabs. I wasn't surfing to pages that contained heavy graphics, java, or anything that would justify the browser using so much memory, I just had been to a lot of different pages during that session.
So I say, not only is the 100Mb memory usage on pages confirmable, it's an underestimate of the scope of the problem; the browser's memory usage keeps expanding until you notice it, or the browser crashes.
I t think the memory problem has NO direct connection to the number of hours you have the browser open. Only, how many tabs you have open, and how many pages you have surfed to in each tab. Most people would surf more sites the longer the browser is open, and I think it's that act of surfing more sites that increases the memory usage, and the memory usage stays high, even if I start closing tabs; only a complete shutdown of the browser is needed to fix it.
I consider it highly annoying, and i've never recently had this problem of excessive memory usage with IE or Opera, no matter how many browser windows I opened or how much surfing I did, so I consider it a serious disadvantage of using Firefox rather than say Opera or Internet Explorer.
The number and severity of its security problems certainly qualify as "horrible." Obvious? Depends on who you ask. I'm in IT; I think so. Most people in IT would probably agree with that. End users? Maybe not. They have a different idea of "obvious" than most /. readers.
To put this into perspective, I haven't had a security problem on a windows box in over four years. All you need is to follow some good practices and you're perfectly safe. Vista with its limited user powers should help a lot in reducing the effort involved in those "good practices".
I love my Mac, but WTF do I have to reboot after updates?
Because the kernel has been updated. After you update itunes a reboot is not needed.
Is it horrible that an OS designed in the late 1960s, when the industry was still so young and inexperienced with security, is better-designed than NT and its descendants, which were designed twenty years later?
If you're referring to multics, no commercial operating systems have caught up to that yet. If you're referring to unix I have to disappoint you, unix was not designed to be inherently secure. On early versions there were many security issues, because the concept of limited user powers took a while to gain a foothold, and even when they did the system's design was still full of security holes. The first internet worm (the morris worm) specifically targeted unix systems, in case you've forgotten. Just look at the security track record of commercial unices. It's pretty poor.
Linux is not inherently more secure than other commonly available operating systems, it's just too much of a moving target because there is no binary stability, so a worm can't target large swaths of systems at the same time. That binary instability is a strength, but it's also the reason why there are so few binary drivers and commercial applications on linux.
There's ancient bug about mozilla coming up sloooooooooow in Win32 after it's been on for a long time. We're talking about mozilla 0.8 era bug and it affects all the related products that I'm aware of (TB, FF, probably even the calendar app)
The crux of the problem is that the bug affects only win32. So the developers, one and all, refuse(d) to treat it as a codebase problem because it has to be a windows problem.
"slow" in this instance means over 1 minute and easily 2-3 minutes. I even demonstrated at the time that it's not paging issue as such as mozilla/FF sits doing absolutely nothing (from perfmon monitor tool) for long period and when it finally starts swapping pages in it happens pretty quickly (5-10sec)
It was subsequently "fixed" by making FF etc hold on to the memory they've reserved instead of releasing it back to the OS. Hence you get ridiculous 300MB memory footprint that shrinks to 50MB after restarting FF even with the same pages open. Same goes for TB and all the other apps I'm sure.
So if you've got any kind of memory leak, mozilla apps want to keep it all in ram.