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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."
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.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
From the original blog post:
So that is all the memory being reclaimed upon closing all but one of the windows, and then doing nothing whatsoever.
That graph is based on 30 open windows at a time, not 'basic web browsing'.
if you're still on beta two, try beta four - it's noticably faster!
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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?
How about the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, produced by the WebKit developers?
The latest Firefox 3 nightly beat Safari 3.1 as well as the latest WebKit nightly on my iMac (2.0 GHz C2D, 2 GB RAM). You might want to run your own tests; you'll find that Firefox 3 is pretty damn quick.
"Slashdot - the one place on the internet where guys brag about how small it is." - that IT girl
try AbiWord (http://www.abisource.com/download/index.phtml), there's a windows version.
course if you switch over to something like Ubuntu it would be even better, though I'd imagine that would be pretty tough to do at least until XP stops getting supported some year
You can find benchmarking results for a somewhat different test with Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 using tabs instead of windows. They still show the same end result: Firefox uses less memory than other browsers.
FF3 was in the latest Alpha Build of Ubuntu 8.04
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.
According to pavlov: We purposefully put in a 3 second delay for all the pages so that would all take about the same amount of time in all browsers (as my post was about memory usage, not page load times (also, several browsers don't render all the pages correctly)) and didn't want to confuse anyone.
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.
I happened to have a Fedora system, so I stuck with FF 1.5.x right up until the first day of FF 3b1. I do a lot of work in MediaWiki environments, often pounding away the whole day in FF. Somehow, I rarely manage to have less than 50 tabs open, occasionally as many as 200, in four to eight windows scattered over four desktops.
Memory usage under 1.5.x was unbelievably bad. After a week of heavy use, it would routinely plateau in the 1-1.5 GB range, at which point it would become intolerably slow and force me to restart.
I've downloaded every FF 3 beta the day of first release, and pounded on them all.
3b1 crapped out after just over 2 weeks of heavy use. 3b2 was noticeably better, but not perfect. I wasn't thrilled with 3b3. Page transitions to previously open tabs became more sluggish, back/forward browsing was slower, and they really messed up window to window tab move (didn't take the tab history along for the ride, causing me to lose some major unsaved edits while discovering this unpleasant fact, which happily is now fixed in 3b4).
3b4 has been tremendously solid over the relatively short period since its release. Virtual 540MB, resident 330MB. That's spectacularly low by the standards of previous releases for the intensity of my use. Back/forward page transitions on aged tabs remains slower than for 3b1, but not annoyingly so. Overall, it just feels solid now.
I'm having trouble comprehending that *anyone* once said Firefox had no serious memory leaks. Say what? Firefox 1.5 was the Ginny Sacramoni of web browsers. I'm happy to confirm that Firefox has successfully excised the 90-pound mole from its waddling derriere.
On Windows, Athlon XP 2400+ (2GHz), 1GB Ram, Firefox3 beta 4 vs WebKit nightly 31109 (today)
FF3b4:http://preview.tinyurl.com/2xwkm3 7001.8 ms
WebKit:http://preview.tinyurl.com/2cjjfc 8503.4 ms
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Firefox 2 lets you reopen closed tabs, so I imagine that Firefox 3 would also have that functionality.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
With 1GHz I'd still choose Opera - definatelly feels _much_ more snappy with many tabs open.
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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
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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.
The chart was generated by running the same test, which may or may not measure your browsing habits, on all browsers and seeing how they reacted.
As an Opera user, I am surprised, but hope that the release version of Opera 9.5x will be better than the beta with respect to this. The other thing is FF 3.0's Javascript speed, which has improved remarkably.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
They tried using IE8 beta also, it crashed so it wasn't included.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
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.
Just right click on the tab bar (not on a tab), and click "Undo Close Tab".
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Presuming you're not joking, look under History to Recently Closed Tabs.
Firefox 2.0.0.12. No special plug-ins, add-ons, etc. etc. etc.
So how does one enable it?
(This is on a Mac Powerbook with OSX 10.4.11, if that matters. I've also seen that menu item with FF on my linux box and my wife's NT and Vista systems, and it was also greyed out there. So I'm baffled. What good is it if it can't be used?
You don't have the Estonian language pack installed, do you??? :-) https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/129749Ubuntu Bug 129749 discusses the issue (although I understand yours is on OSX . . .)
There are a few bug reports I found whilst Googling and also looking in Google Groups. Some IceWeasel Bug ID #400704 commentary points to not having a home page defined; one user said defining the home page to be "about:blank" fixed it. More promisingly (I think) is that under about:config, there is an entry called browser.sessionstore.enabled. Try checking it and turn it on if it's off. http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.support.firefox/browse_thread/thread/4b9ba0eb24229c34/d4a1b0188a9e17ac?hl=en&lnk=st&q=firefox+%22recently+closed+tabs%22+(%22grayed%22+OR+%22greyed%22)#d4a1b0188a9e17ac
Just a guess . . . since I haven't experienced it myself.
To remove the home button right click on Home, click Customize, then click on the Home button and Drag it into the big box of icon things that opens up.
That will pull it off of the toolbar.
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You don't have the Estonian language pack installed, do you??? :-)
;-) I also have Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek (Polytonic), and 3 Chinese packs. I wonder if this might cause problems? I know that I'm constantly stumbling across inexplicable, spontaneous switches of language. This is especially annoying when it switches to Swedish or Finnish, because they're nearly the same as U.S. Extended, and it sometimes takes me a while to realize why things aren't working right.
...
... under about:config, there is an entry called browser.sessionstore.enabled. Try checking it and turn it on if it's off.
No, but I do have Finnish Extended and Swedish Pro, which are pretty similar. (Some linguists argue that Estonian is a dialect of Finnish, but the Finns insist it isn't because Estonian is incomprehensible to them.
Some IceWeasel Bug ID #400704 commentary points to not having a home page defined;
It's defined here, as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random, which is one of my favorite "pages".
It's there, and it was on.
Maybe I'll try experimenting some more. I did ask google, of course, and while it finds lots of pages that mention undoing a tab delete in firefox, the first couple dozen don't seem to mention how they do it. They just say how useful it is, which I'd agree with, because I'm always closing the wrong tab. It probably has a lot to do with having a dozen browsers installed (for web testing purposes), and no two of them handle tabs quite the same.
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