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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.
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.
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.
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'.
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?
This is just the result of one test with one benchmarking tool; on top of that, it was a test with the vendor's own tool. The "MAY" in the article reflects the uncertainty regarding whether this tool and the particular test conducted with it appropriately reflects real-life usage scenarios.
Not a very realistic test, in that case, since most people tend to recycle browser windows. Adding in proper cleanup routines when the window is closed doesn't address this. That said, it's great that Gecko is trimming some of the fat. Hopefully it will start to be a competitor to WebKit in the mobile space soon.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
They uninstalled IE?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
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
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
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.
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..
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.
Actually you will be surprised to note that cows do indeed breed, and so do whales. Of course, they don't breed with apostrophes the way your words do.
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.
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.
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.
Clippy: I see you're trying to use apostrophes. You seem to be confused. Did you mean:
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
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
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.
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.
I guess, if the Mozilla developer had his cup of jo the morning he came up with that feature, that he decided to store the contents of the deleted tabs in the Mozilla cache, that has a user-defined maximum size on disk or RAM. That would sound logical to me.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Not joking at all. I've seen that "Recently Closed Tabs" entry in the History menu, but it's always greyed out and unusable. I just tested it by opening a new tab, selecting it to verify that it was a real tab, and closing it. The "Recently Closed Tabs" menu entry is still greyed out, although I just closed a tab. I've also had a number of other tabs open during the day, and closed them, and that "Recently Closed Tabs" thingy is always greyed out when I check it.
;-)
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?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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.
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.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.