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Firefox 3 May Be More Memory Efficient Than Either IE or Opera
Edy52285 writes "Ars Technica has an article showing benchmarks pitting Firefox 3 Beta 4 against other browsers. Contenders include IE7, Firefox 2, Opera 9.5 Beta, and Safari 3.0.4 Beta. The piece includes a graph depicting FF3's memory usage well below that of the other browsers. The in-testing browser even trumps Opera, which has long been regarded as the fastest browser around."
I just love this when someone provides a graph without even a detailed scale!
May I use your sig please?
It's one thing to know that IE7 is a resource hog, but another thing entirely to view the graph in the article and be confronted with hard evidence of just how abysmal it is.
I'm going to print out that graph and put it on my wall. Then, when my users come to me and ask why our enterprise isn't rolling out IE7 on our systems, I can just point to it.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Firefox 3 will certainly be a blessing to my company if this holds up through official release. My company is standardized on Firefox for all web browsing and intranet apps. Our PCs are not necessarily cutting edge technology filled with copious amounts of RAM. The average speed is 1GHz and 512Mb RAM running XP. Now if only all apps took the route of less/improved memory usage with each new version instead of the bloat I am suffering with Microsoft Word, Citrix, etc.
Bearded Dragon
Based on my experience with firefox 2 I would say that once you have a few plugins (cough: *adblock*) the graph will not be flat but will slowly increase. Not that this is the fault of the browser writers, but it will be many people's real world experience.
Out of curiosity, what's the dropoff and flatline near the end of both Firefox lines on the graph? Anyone know?
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I tried using Opera because it was significantly faster the FF, but the lack of extensions bugs me, and the widgets aren't anywhere near as useful. I love noScript, URLlink, and a couple of other FF extensions in particular.
And yes, i know Opera can block javascript, but I dont like the implementation or how it handles it when compared to noScript. Im looking forward to getting FF3....but I also plan to stop updating Ubuntu on my laptop at 8.04 LTS (i have an older Thinkpad T40 thats starting to show its age), and wonder if FF3 will be available for it.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
The more interesting question is of course whether the firebox beta also wins when other benchmarking tools including those produced by competiting browser developers are used.
We've being peppered with articles about FF3 lately. Most have been fairly light on content but the consistent high praise (and personal experience using beta2) has made it clear to me that FF3 will be very, very good. I'm actually looking forward to the official release.
Getting excited about a new version of a web browser: how 90's is that?
Serve Gonk.
That graph is based on 30 open windows at a time, not 'basic web browsing'.
Does that mean that it MAY not be? Because the story itself and the accompanying graph seem to indicate that it IS, not that it MAY be. Just, like, clarify, you know?
Your terminal must be upside down.
Starting with you, apparently. LOWER LINES ARE BETTER. Next.
That is basic web browsing if you aren't using pop-up blocking, and going to the wrong sites
Which graph are you looking at? On the one linked, IE has double the memory footprint of Firefox when 30 tabs are open, and doesn't reclaim any memory when they're closed.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Your link points to the twofo home page. You fail it.
Thanks for playing, though.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I think a much better test would be to see a single window with 30 tabs. I don't know anyone that would have 30 windows of a browser running. All this proves to me is that FF does a better job of sharing resources across instances. Does anyone use windows rather than tabs to manage their browsing?
Full Tilt
From the graph in TFA it seems that IE tries to collect and use as many RAM as possible until there's no more, and begins using the swap file, while FF (of either version) humbly swaps in after a certain time. In that case FF is destined to die as a result of lacking of food in the ecosystem.
And they are running the test in Windows. Who knows whether there's not an undocumented feature of IE which is telling it's O$ to swap *all* FF's RAM into disk? Or even freeing FF's memory? The predator always wins.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Can't remember where I read it, but I recently read a description of how they achieved some of this efficiency. Much of it has to do with using a different memory allocator which avoids fragmentation. That's good. However, a lot of it also comes from "expiring" cached data according to some time-based policy. That's probably a good idea too, but it's not a memory savings that can be considered "for free". You're actually expunging cached data from memory, which means you may have to reload it again later, and you're spending CPU cycles to enforce that policy. It probably requires minimal CPU to do that, but if they implement it via polling it could screw up the processor's ability to sleep, which in turn jacks up battery usage on laptops. Witness the recent effort on linux to get various apps to "fix" the way they behave in order to play better on laptops. This could end up being a regression in that area.
So it appears that you are not a pornography aficionado.
I've been using Firefox 3 on Linux since beta4 and I've been keeping up with the nightly builds, and I'm a bit surprised after reading all of these articles about its new found memory efficiency. It's definitely not what I'm seeing. In fact, it's markedly worse on my set up than Firefox 2.
I've done everything I could think of to reduce its memory footprint and track down the problem. I've created a new profile, clean of extensions, modified certain about:config parameters such as "network.prefetch-next", "browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers" and "browser.cache.memory.capacity" (does this one even work in FF3?), nothing seems to help.
Eventually, after a few hours of heavy use, it's taking up 260+ MB with only one tab open, which is ridiculous.
Apart from memory issues though, it's an improvement all around. Especially the new bookmarking system and visual integration with the rest of the desktop.
How does it suffer with Myspace open?
I've been using FF3 for months and it's definitely efficient with memory, but the graph doesn't reflect my own experience with IE7 and FF2. At the moment, for instance, on my XPSP2 system with both FF2 and IE7 running, probably for weeks, FF2 is using about 509MB and IE7 about 208MB.
Perhaps some of the differences here have to do with plugins? There are still a bunch that don't work with FF3.
"Internet Explorer 8 could not be benchmarked because they crashed during the test." ... don't say it was an "out of memory" crash?? ;-)
But what about threading?
I'm tired of every browser tab and window I have open locking up so Flash can render in one of the windows.
Even IE doesn't do this!
Question everything
Has anyone looked at the stats on apples site? http://www.apple.com/safari/
;)
Doesn't it look odd, how the 1.5 seconds between safari and firefox is the same size as the 2 seconds between IE and Opera? And how the 1.0 second between firefox and opera is MUCH smaller than both?
If apple can't get the graphs to be 'correct', how do we know that the browser speed test is any good?
It is a good thing other people test these things
The drop-off you see near the end of the graph is where both versions of Firefox crash. I'm excited, because unlike the old version, this now actually really helps reduce its memory usage.
I burned it to CD and it still let through water from the middle, ergo it leaks
which is totally what she said
500MB should be enough for 1 browser...
80 CC D8 AF AE D3 AB 54 B7 2E CE 67 C7
Except the article says:
During intensive browsing with approximately 50 tabs
I come here for the love
that is certainly "basic browsing", I'm barely browsing and I have just 8 browser windows open with just 1, 1, 16, 5 (this window), and 2, 5, 3, and 2 windows. That's already and believe me, only one window is really browsing (the one with 16 tabs), it is very very basic browsing. That's 35 windows. Basic browsing. (btw, I'm using Opera 9.2 and the memory size is 77 MB)
Not until cow's and whale's breed!!
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
I used to hear from a buddy about how much he disliked Firefox because it was a memory pig, but never saw it myself until a few days ago. I'm not sure of the why or how, but after browsing http://www.deviantart.com/ for an hour or so, opening each deviation in a new tab, my system started crawling. Checking task manager I found Firefox to be using 1.7GB of memory. Closing every tab did nothing to release it, closing Firefox did.
It would have been nice if they had included a comparison against IE 6 as well. I know of several environments (mine included) where IE 6 is still considered the standard browser due to internal application incompatibility with FF or IE 7. The same goes for my previous place of employment. And I'm sure those two environments aren't the only ones, either. I would imagine that there are a lot of enterprise environments that are still stuck on IE 6 for one reason or another.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
My (very) significant other keeps 5-10 windows open with 4-12 tabs in each... No kidding...
Here is the top(1) entry of her firefox-session (running linux-firefox-2 on FreeBSD/amd64):
My own (native) session uses 2.5 times less... In other words — "common practice" is a very loose standard :)
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
So far with the beta. It may be purely subjective, but when I click the task bar icon, FF3 opens _instantly_ or near enough as I can tell. And I've been using FF2 since it's release.
I also left a couple of browser windows open all night last night and was able to navigate pretty well this morning; if I'd done that with FF2 it would have been like viewing the web over dial-up again.
I think what impressed me the most was the hassle-free install. I uninstalled FF2, thinking I was ready to start with a fresh browser, and to my complete surprise, FF3 installed with nearly the exact same settings as I had been using in FF2. With the exception of that pesky "home" button that I can't seem to get rid of (What, no right-click > delete option?) everything is exactly the same. I'm still trying to get used to the address bar that tries to predict what site you're looking for as well; I suspect that with some tweaking I'll be able to dial it in pretty well.
Cheers~
There is simply too much glass..
Safari 3 has been out of beta for some time now (3.1 came out today), so why use the beta version. Doesn't it go without saying that if they include all the debugging stuff in there that it will use more memory than the non-beta version? It's legitimate to use the beta version of FF3, since that's the thing you're talking about, but all the other browsers for comparison should be the latest release versions of the respective software.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I was wondering why safari's memory graph ends so much sooner than the otehrs. Is it really 7-10 times as fast???
This topic will inevitably go to the "it's not Firefox, it's the extensions" canned memory-hog statement. I would be perfectly happy with an Extension Monitor that tells me the resources extensions are actually taking. Then we can finally point some fingers in true slashdot style!
(Disclaimer, I have never searched for such a thing, nor am I interested in writing one)
Worse, today I had someone call me because refreshing the frameset (in use for over 2 years) takes her back to the start page.
People do not want to learn, they are happier to have 30 window instances & step through them all rather than have 3 open with 10 tabs all neatly organized.
yeah it's cool to see how code should not be written...
I've not read some text but I expected the drop to be from closing tabs, but Opera let you undo that so I guess that's why it wasn't freed.
Anyway, you post was probably a joke but look at the Safari graph?!!
In any case Safari 3.0 is a piece of crap, it eats 1 GB of ram within a day here.
Firefox 3.0 was slow as shit thought (in OS X), Opera rules.
Flash sucks even more in OS X than in general, I know it seems weird but it really does!
While I know you were making a joke youre point was actually insightful. Namely the browser speed wars is something of a game of leapfrog. Any browser that is reasonably fast is a good browsers. But what matters is that the browser maker keeps the browser among the best at all time.
That is to say if every 3 years browser X gets a big update and becomes the fastest for a few months and then gets severely eclipsed for 2 years. it's not the best browser.
Speaking of Karma hell, a good example of this is Thunderbird email which occasionally shines but then goes and wnaders in the woods for years at a time
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The problem I have with this is that you're only getting half the story, if that. First, about twenty bloggers had to comment on the original graphs because they didn't include any version of Opera, which could only make a fairer test - FF vs IE is hardly a shocker. The Opera line on the graph instantly made a better competitor and blew most of their shocking claims about how well FF did compared to "other browsers" away - it sat dead in the narrow line between the two versions of Firefox. Next, the test is very specific about how it operates and requires lots of similar options to be enabled on all the tested browsers (to counteract memory caches and different cache-management algorithms). That all boils down to mean that in a certain, small area (*memory* management under a particular caching profile), the latest version of FF "wins". Not bad seeing as that's what the statistics were designed to show in the first place.
My main bugbears are that it doesn't take any account of CPU usage (I could decrease the memory usage of a program by half if CPU speed was no obstacle by just compressing everything I put into and take out of RAM), user-experience, cross-browser differences (so turning off some cache options present only in certain browsers is cheating because you still don't KNOW how they work or what they sacrifice for performance elsewhere. Default settings would have made more sense given that most people don't touch caching etc. options and that that's what a novice user would see. You would, of course, have to account for user-experience at the same time), the total amount of RAM installed (who's to say that Opera wouldn't adjust itself on a 256MB RAM machine to do less caching etc.?), total disk size (IE with several Gigs of disk cache isn't unusual nowadays but my Opera does just fine with a few hundred), "nice factor" to other programs (i.e. does it assume that you're ONLY running the browser, or is it pitched to let you use other programs alongside it well?) and a million and one other factors.
Given that I browse with Opera on a 600MHz laptop with 348Mb, I'm very happy with its performance. It can't do heavy-Java well but that's expected. It can do streaming video, dozens of simultaneous websites, Flash, all sorts without coming to a grinding halt. The startup speeds are reasonable and not due to disk-thrashing (it looks more CPU-bound to me). Firefox, any version, on the same machine slows to an absolute crawl after a few websites and thrashes like mad on startup.
I worry that programmers are looking at those graphs and congratulating themselves, without any real metric of what else has changed or stayed the same. Sure, memory allocations have dropped and there is more real RAM available to the machine but what does that mean if it's at the expense of other resources or, worse, the user experience?
It goes something like this:
IE > exploit > botnet > spam > viagra and penis enlargement sales > "you".
Reduced memory usage is great, but if you're more interested in speed you should take a look at Firefox 3b4's results on the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark, where testers commonly found that it performed twice as well as the latest Opera beta, and nearly three times as fast as Firefox 2.
I haven't yet heard anything definitive about Gecko's performance in FF3 with respect to FF2 or the rendering engines in other major web browsers, but from my own experience with the betas I can subjectively say "it's fast"; if I'm missing out on speed using FF3b4 instead of the latest WebKit, I can't tell the difference myself.
And Beta 4 is quite stable, to boot. Mozilla really pulled out all the stops on this one... unless you have incompatible extensions holding you back, do yourself a favor and upgrade now.
Since they were testing a lot of beta versions of new browsers. I wonder why they didn't include IE8.
... I start to use Google Maps. Panning around and zooming in and out quickly bring the amount of memory used from 78mb to over 300mb on my machine. I've seen it as high as 500mb before it starts to impact response times and I restart it. Is this a problem with Firefox or Google then???
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
I do use 30+ open windows at a time : I just don't bother to close the tabs. Sometimes I can't tell where I'm going (like a google search result) and so I keep open a few results in separated tabs, never closing the search tab.
Clippy: I see you're trying to use apostrophes. You seem to be confused. Did you mean:
it eats 200-300MB and it's efficient ? whatahell!
I'm sorry. Are you chromatically challenged?
Browsers: Firefox v2.0.0.12 (no plugins), IE v6.0.2900.2180 (I can't stand the look of IEv7), Opera v9.23, Firefox v3Beta4. Caches cleared before test.
Note: Browsers (espec. IE) don't necessarily show all memory used by their entry in Task Manager so I prefer to know what memory was free before they loaded, and just as importantly after the browser in question is closed.
Comments: Ok, I was surprised how well FF2 & FF3 did in these tests. I also noticed Firefox properly rendering that slideshow-like flash thingy on espn.com (where my Opera setup doesn't show it at all). And that Opera acted pigishly
I come here for the love
I didn't get it, and I have some questions. On the graph what does the Time axis represent, seconds, days, months? What the hay did they do to get c.500Mb of IE? I can't get near that even if I have several youtube browsers running, CNET, MSN bloat all in tabs of 1 instance, or ctrl-N windows or separate instances and combining the mem usage. help me understand!
I rarely have less than 20 web pages open. I'm counting 36 tabs in my Opera window right now. And I thought I had a second Opera window a couple of days ago, but I think I accidentally killed it. Opera still lacks a feature to undo that.
One unpopular idea on Ubuntu brainstorm was posted by just such a user. People have been told that advanced/better means not only to have more memory but also to need more memory.
Still, it's great to see that FF is getting to the point where they can start optimizing more.
I see the same problem using Pandora. It appears to be a Flash problem not a FF problem. The current FF garbage collection doesn't catch self referential objects & therefore never cleans them up. The new GC system is supposed to catch more of them.
If you ran NoScript on Firefox, you probably were entirely happy with the memory usage. Much of the memory fragmentation and leaks due to circular references was caused by Javascript, either on pages loaded or other extensions running. NoScript radically reduces the amount of Javascript being executed by your browser and therefore radically reduces the amount of memory used/fragmented/leaked.
Plus of course, the performance of page loading also improves because your browser isn't trying to execute some moronic scripts designed to track your movements and display "punch the monkey" ads.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
I started using Opera on the OLPC as Opera is touted as the minimum resource GUI browser. I once tested FireFox 3 Beta 3 without too much expectation, and was positively surprised that it gave a feeling of quicker response than Opera. Same with FireFox Beta 4. There are still some scrolling issues and redrawing that is irritatingly slow. E.g. the mailbox overview frame of gmail.
Call it anecdotal evidence, but that chart doesn't represent my real world experience using IE7 and FF2. Both seem to top out at 200megs even with a bunch of tabs open and pandora streaming away. The big difference though, is that any time I minimize IE7, it's memory footprint drops to a fraction of that. Where as FF2, even when minimized, still sucks up all the memory it uses while active.
In any case, I've never had a 500 meg IE7 session.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
The tag 'msie' is outdated. It's Windows Internet Explorer nowadays. Typed on Safari 3.1 released today.
30 tabs /is/ basic browsing. Tabs are the new back-button.
I guess Opera spoiled everybody when they introduced the tabbed browsing environment, and its low memory footprint. Now, people will open links in new tabs, sort of a reading queue, and then close the tab, instead of going back, back, back. Especially with sites like slashdot, digg, reddit, blogs, search engines, porn thumb galleries, etc. Where each link is represents a "fork" in your browing.
these betas have been shit so far, worse than any beta software I've ever used
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
Maybe my experience of Firefox 2 is atypical, but I don't think its numbers are correct. In my experience of using IE7, Firefox 2 and Firefox 3. Firefox 2 uses MORE memory than IE7 at times, while Firefox 3 uses between a quarter and a third of the memory of Firefox 2.
I have now switched exclusively to Firefox 3 on my windows machine, while using 2 on my linux machine. Firefox 3 IMO is the best browser for resources.
That said however, I don't find it particularly fast, its slower than I remember Firefox 1 (I don't have it to compare, but from memory it was fast), but a little faster than Firefox 2.
Right now I have 12 Firefox windows open, with 1, 3, 5, 8, 3, 23, 9, 7, 15, 13, 12 and 15 tabs respectively. That's 114 pages. And for me, that's typical. So if by "30 windows" you mean "30 pages" (either 1 window with 30 tabs, or 30 windows with 1 tab each) then, yes, that would be "basic web browsing" to me!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I've got Firefox installed with APT on my Ubuntu system that's up to date, but the Beta (naturally) isn't available for upgrade.
.deb package of the Beta that won't cause any trouble? Maybe I could keep a Beta repo in my sources.list, and choose whether (or not) to upgrade to Betas through my update-manager as they're released.
If I upgrade it from the tarfile, will APT be able to continue to maintain Firefox against the official repositories? Or am I polluting my installation just to get the memory-eating v2.0.0.12 off my desktop ASAP?
Where can I find a
--
make install -not war
I don't care whether FF3 is more memory-efficient than IE7. I need it to be more memory-efficient than FF2!
I like how safari, after what I can only assume is a period of 5 minutes, crashes and then goes home crying.
sudo kill -9 84676
There, fixed that for you!
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
Firefox 3 May Be More Memory Efficient Than IE and Opera
Somehow along the way I made a bad choice in life and now must live with 0 Karma.
While reducing wasted memory is a good thing(and memory leaks are worse). Opera's or Firefox's memory usage can include caching resources... Opera's been talked to as the "fastest" browser around, not the lightest... There's a difference, and I'm surprised so few people on Slashdot caught it.
Having less memory leaks makes you faster, but being faster can happen using more memory.
Applying -9 to an innocently running process is a sign of extreme amateurishness in a sys-admin. Presuming, sudo is even installed is another — one does not need it for the most common usages on an OS (such as *BSD), where only a 0-group (wheel) member can become root, and where the regular su is happy to read commands from stdin:
That is, if I ever wanted to become a regular Slashdotter again in the first place — by parting with my significant other over the amount of memory her web-browsing is consuming on my system... Sorry, it is not you, it is me: I just can't stand the amount of browser-tabs you are opening, dear!
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Memory Efficiency doesn't equate faster performance. Actually it normally has an inverse effect. Normaly the more stuff you can store in memory and calculate during the systems down time means an overall faster performance. Yes there is the issue when it takes to much and starts paging the OS then it boggs down. But normally memory efficiency and performance in speed are inversely proportional to each other.
In them olden days code was more memory tight not because it was faster but because we didn't have that much space to put the memory. The old programs suffered a penalty because of this.
I am not saying Firefox 3 isn't faster then the others. But just by saying it uses less memory means it runs faster is rather unrelated. Unless every byte of memory they save they found a way to do the same thing in the same amount of time. Or the old version just wasn't efficiently using memory (which I think is the case) Having a lot of wast in memory.
But there are algorithms that work much better if you use a lot of memory vs. Others that don't
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Quite honestly, I don't care about memory consumption so long as it remains reasonable. My Opera-process has been running for weeks with, at times, heavy usage (dozens of open windows, some with highly dynamic pages). It's been stable and quick throughout that time, and did not grow to a size where I'd have to wonder what the hell is causing swapping.
Yes, you can crash Opera (often related to badly coded plugins), and yes, you can make it unresponsive. I found, however, that it's far easier to do that to Firefox than Opera, and that Opera has been consistently snappier. Maybe that'll change with FF3. Hopefully it will, competition in that arena is always good.
Where on this graph would IE8 sit? I've seen several graphs comparing beta browers in an attempt to show that their browser is better but at least 1 browser always seems to be neglected.
I was joking, though am admittedly an amateur admin (holy cow, alliteration). In the past, I have admin'd a small development box (Fedora) for a small team and when the server was slowed down to a crawl, anybody running Firefox was killed first to free up resources. Sure, I could have had better policies but nobody ever complained and I have doubts that they were ever doing anything really important in their web-browser --- since it was only setup for Remote Desktop anyhow.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
My point was not against the killing — it was against kill -9 . Regular kill is just as effective in most cases, but gives the process a chance to clean-up — inside a signal-handler. Using -9 gives no such chances — the process never knows, what hit it. This is the common source of left-over temporary files, of orphaned shared-memory segments and other ill-effects...
Only if a process refuses to die for seconds after a regular kill, is trying the -9 justified...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Why do you use your computer like that? What is the advantage of having it powered on all the time running several opera windows with a bunch of tabs?
...
Not trolling, genuinely curious. I turn mine off every day, and almost never have more than 15-20 tabs open. If I need to keep something around I just bookmark it. So just wondering
I don't understand it. Am I doing something wrong?
I absolutely cannot get Firefox to crash simply from browsing. I often have 2+ windows with 5-10 tabs in each. While not as intensive as some people here on Slashdot, it's my usage pattern. I don't think I've been able to get the memory over 60MB. Generally I use top or ps to check. My last system was the same. No issues, ever.
The girlfriend's computer, however, is a different story. Both are running Gentoo and I sync & update usually in the same day. They are both tuned for their processors and have similar use flags (essentially the same environment & settings on both). Hers usually sits at about 600MB (virtual). It crashes often. She usually has one window, less than 5 tabs open. It generally crashes 5+ times a day.
Hardware:
My system: Custom; AMD Athlon64 X2 5200+, 4GB DDR2, 500GB HDD.
My Old sys: Custom; AMD AthlonXP 2500+, 1GB DDR2, 120GB HDD.
Her system: Mac Mini; Intel Core Duo (1.6Ghz?), 1.5GB DDR2, 80GB HDD. (Just upgraded the ram about a month ago -- crashes less frequent now but still uses lots of vRAM)
I've also noticed that my brothers system runs it fine (XP 64bit) on AMD. My mom's laptop (Vista 32bit) on Intel has memory issues... no crashes that I know of though (very surprising as everything else crashes).
Now that I sit and read what I just wrote, I am pretty sure it has something to do with swapping on a 2.5" 5400rpm drive. Maybe I'll disable the swap on the Mini and see what happens.
To me, bookmarks are mostly for reference sites. For stuff I want to keep permanently, not stories I want to read once. Yet often I encounter a link with a story or movie I want to check out at a more appropriate time, so I leave it open in a tab.
Ofcourse it's also possible, when fixing an issue, that I've got a tab with a list of all outstanding issues, one tab for each issue, one tab with the production version of the site, one tab with the test version, one tab with the dev version, and usually a couple more tabs with all sorts of debugging information.
As to why I keep everything on all the time, I usually have a lot open, and when I want to turn the PC off, I need to close a lot of programs, all of which I have to start again when I turn the PC on again. Since I'm lazy, I usually just leave it on. Or use hibernate. Which is a pain, because Windows' hibernate suffers from some odd bug that makes it slower each time it recovers from hibernation.
And since I always leave everything on, I also have stuff open that I haven't used in days, so my desktop gets a bit cluttered. I'm not saying this is an efficient way to work. It just happens to be the way I work.
Ah, I see. Your days seem much more hectic than mine ... I'm usually only doing one thing at a time for the day, so I just have a couple reference sites, email, and the web page(s) if working on web stuff. Also I use Ubuntu so in rare cases I need everything the same as when I leave I just save to session and turn off.
:-)
Now for open terminals, that's a different story, it's quite often a huge mess! Not even multiple desktops help too much sometimes
This notion that using less memory means a program is more "efficient" is ridiculous. I have 4 GB of RAM (well, I have more, but my computer has 4 GB). What use is it to me if a given program decides to use only 100 MB, when it could use all the rest to cache stuff and / or speed up requests? For example, Opera keeps a fully rendered copy of each tab in memory, plus the last couple of history entries, so you can switch instantly between them, and I think the latest versions of Firefox do the same. That's an efficient use of memory, IMO.
Good software will regularly monitor free memory, using more when it can and scaling down to the minimum when other parts of the system need it.
Unlike Firefox and MSIE, Opera includes an e-mail client (which keeps all its messages indexed for instant searching, BTW), so this is a bit like comparing the power consumption of CPUs where one CPU has a built-in memory controller and the other one doesn't (another recurring problem with some "hardware review" sites).
Unless they can make the browsers' configuration virtually identical (which means adding a lot of extensions and plug-ins to Firefox, plus Thunderbird, to make it do everything Opera does "out of the box"), the memory usage comparison is more or less meaningless. And, even if they do all that, simply looking at the amount of RAM used won't tell us anything about how efficiently it's used. Opening 50 pages at the same time and then closing all of them is hardly a normal (or relevant) usage pattern.
It's also funny how Christopher Blizzard says that "the small memory footprint in the latest Firefox 3 beta is proof that Firefox is ready for mobile environments". Well, they tested it againt the desktop version of Opera. Do they really think the version that runs on my 6 year old Nokia phone is designed to use 200 MB of RAM...? If they think FF is ready to run on cell phones and PDAs, why don't they just make a version available for download, and let people try it? Anyone can download and try Opera Mini, for example.
FF 3 is looking quite nice, but these articles read more like marketing. The objective should be to make the best browser possible; not to try to convince people that it's better than the competition.
Your system is overheating. I keep mine below 0 degrees celsius, and wasn't able to recreate the leaks you described.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Clippy: You seem to be delivering a veiled insult. Did you mean:
You know, you can be more memory efficient just by having less memory leaks than any comparable product...
- I stole your sig.
When I finally upgraded my main computer (PPRO 200, ca. 104 MB RAM) in 2005 to a fast machine (AMD64 3000+, 1GB) Netscape 3 on FreeBSD 4.11 started almost instantly and was just as fast with rendering HTML etc. Of course, webstandards 'improve' and to use them (e.g. slashdot no longer rendered properly) I had to install firefox. Result: Slower than netscape 3 on the PPRO 200. Bummer.
Too bad NS3 doesn't run on more recent FreeBSD, but of course, the browser to have would really be Netscape 1. No automatic image decoding (UUE) so you had to guess whether it was worth it, and just one main window for HTML, newsgroups (bookmarks too IIRC).
While it's all good and great for FF3, that graph shows FF2 using less memory than IE7, and that, with all due respect, is bullshit.
I'm a Firefox only user for years now. But by todays "memory-hog" standards, I don't see why memory should be an issue anymore.
Ok, it'll still be cool for Linux. But until Linux can come close to the bootup speed of at least Windows (if not BeOS), I'll still keep Windows 98SE around for games and casual surfing.
Is if they fixed the whole tab permanently loading which screws up the rest of the tabs so I have to reopen Firefox. Last night I had to shut FF down and reopen 3 times before I got fed up and switched to IE7. I decided to install the Beta which still it occurs in. Talked to some people at work and they see it as well. The only solution I have seen work sometimes is by clearing out all of the cached date i.e. history, cookies, etc which is unacceptable.
Anyone know why it happens and how to fix it?
A naked firefox installation needs at least 6-7 plugins for me to get to the same level of functionality as barebones opera. Ad blocking, no-script, flash block, tab mix plus, etc, which are all right there for you without any plugins on opera.
I bet the memory usage will shoot up once all these plugins are loaded.
Put it this way, I never believed any of the claims that Firefox was the faster browser, or less of a pig than other browsers, whenever people brought it up before - Because my own experiences did not bear this out.
But I am really impressed by how polished the 3.0 betas are shaping up to be, its now my daily browser (previously Safari).
The piece includes a graph depicting FF3's memory usage well below that of the other browsers. The in-testing browser even trumps Opera, which has long been regarded as the fastest browser around."
Remember that Firefox has beaten IE in benchmarks since version 1, but actual Firefox users know that this meant nothing about real world performance. A benchmark typically measures speed of loading a page, but doesn't acknowledge UI responsiveness (click response, scroll smoothness etc.) which was horrible in Firefox for as long as I remember, compared to any other browser.
Also notice how there confusion in the quote above between speed and memory consumption. Not the same thing at all. Safari eats a lot of RAM, but is the fastest browser in many regards (not the best in some other regards, but still, fastest).
I care about only one benchmark: real world performance.
I'll give it a try- but I recently switched to opera because firefox has been incredibly unstable and slow for me lately- and for some reason keeps dropping the connection- I would be browsing in firefox and suddenly it just couldn't open anything anymore- if I open IE (and now opera) I could continue to browse while firefox just idles trying to load pages- so for now I am sticking w/opera
Hello, Slashbot,
.01 release, new users always claim, " Wow! So much faster than previous version! Uses less RAM! Renders pages much faster than idiot competitor!"
I post from future with Firebot 13.37 Beta. It consume so little RAM it actually puts some back in infernal machine. It so fast clicking Back button come with warning not to change timestream.
I post here to settle argument that apparent speed gains only due to fresh install.
You know how after each
Sensible person may expect diminishing gains in improvement, right? After all, can't better infinte fast, yes?
Not true! Firebot now so fast it create wormhole.
P.S. Wormhole taste like chicken. Oh no, I say too much.
Btw, why do I have 3.0.4 if there is a 3.1 to begin with? Stupid Apple.
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable/test
I have to say, I'm posting from it right now and it is impressive how much quicker it is than FF2!
Until the program uses up all your memory and then drags your entire computer into lag hell. FF3 is an improvement over FF2 in this. Overall FF3 is having a lot less of a negative impact. The single biggest problem I have with web browsing isn't the browser though - it's Flash. Flash, and a few other plugin's, leak tons of memory and hog CPU resources when not even doing anything. This is really bad in Linux.
Other than the Flash issue FF2 and FF3 are both way faster, and less intensive, than IE7 and heck they can even properly render a page.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
It's ironic because this news entry is b0rked in firefox 3 beta 4.
Ok, so I'm still running it, 801.54 MB memory usage atm.