Slashdot Mirror
Firefox 4.0 Beta Candidate Available
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla quietly posted the first beta build of its Firefox 4 browser early this morning. The 'Chromified' browser leaves a solid first impression with a few minor hiccups, but no surprises. If you have been using a previous version of Firefox 3.7, which now officially becomes Firefox 4.0, you should already feel comfortable with this new version. Mozilla has not posted detailed release notes yet, but there seem to be no major changes from Firefox 3.7a6-pre, with the exception that the browser is running more smoothly and with fewer crashes."
Update: 06/29 18:40 GMT by S : Mozilla's Asa Dotzler writes, "Mozilla has not shipped Firefox 4 beta yet. We are in the process of making and testing the final set of changes, but we're not quite there yet." Changed headline to reflect this.
Mount your Failfoxes.
Nice that it was two links deep from the main article...
Download link from Mozilla Nightlies.
Is anyone else getting an immediate segfault when using the Linux x86-64 build? It happens right after starting it.
I know the quality of Firefox has dropped off significantly lately, as many contributors have moved towards Chrome, but this is totally absurd. I've never had betas of any other browser, including Opera, Chrome and Konqueror, crash on me like this.
Does that mean I won't have to rely on Flash for pr0n now, saving a kW or two and reducing my carbon footprint?
Link to linux downloads too? or general downloads?
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4.0_Windows_Theme_Mockups
I knew Firefox was piss slow compared to Chrome, but my god to see how slow is sad. It's why I have been slowly migrating to Chrome where I can, though the lack of some features I need (such as a master password) make Chrome not an option for all the places I need to work. I hope Firefox starts improving as its add-ins and features will only last so long as the other more modern browsers catch up on features next...
...of excess bloat.
But there currently is no single browser without it's shortcomings really...
More importantly is it gonna finally fix the memory leak issue?
Tell me about it. Do you how annoying it is to walk into the office and see memory dribbling out of the computer because of the browser?! I hate it! And my IT support company: PHB IT Services says that memory leaks are actually an OSHA violation and if someone slips on that memory, I could be sued for MILLIONS! So I pay them to come in a clean up all that memory leaking.
That's my management secret: hire only the best!
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
"Mozilla has not posted detailed release notes yet, but there seem to be no major changes from Firefox 3.7a6-pre, with the exception that the browser is running more smoothly and with fewer crashes."
I love software that doesn't swap UIs every major release!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Looking at the past few releases of Firefox, the developers just simply do not care to address it like the problem has been solved. Yet, they continue to perfect their crash and restart tools so when the browser does become unstable (and it always becomes unstable for me after a few hours of hard use) restarting is at least not too painful. Yet, this reeks of addressing the symptom instead of the cause. Have a problem with the browser? Restart it. Yes -- firefox has become the Windows 95 of browsers.
I'd wish they'd just slow down, take a breath, and get their house in order. I'd rather have a stable browser instead of the latest flavor of the month feature addition.
I hate to break it to you, but as chrome adds those features it's going to slow down and get sluggish. Firefox has for some time beat Chrome on memory use. But, OTOH it's somewhat mooted by the fact that Chrome tends to spy and seems to thwart disabling intrusive ads.
I was a long time advocate of Firefox until 3.x. I don't know if it's the fact that websites are more heavily scripted than before or if Firefox is just getting slower (or both!) but c'mon guys! Speed is key.
crazy dynamite monkey
I hate to break it to you, but as chrome adds those features it's going to slow down and get sluggish. Firefox has for some time beat Chrome on memory use. But, OTOH it's somewhat mooted by the fact that Chrome tends to spy and seems to thwart disabling intrusive ads.
That's why I use SRWare Iron. Google spyware removed from Chrome :)
As for features, let's see if Chrome slows down. The Google coders have been doing a better job than the Firefox ones for the last couple of years so perhaps Chrome will be able to grow and not slow down?
What are you people doing that causes Firefox to have such horrible stability problems? I leave Firefox open for literally days at a time, with anywhere between 10-25 tabs open, and I have no stability problems.
Living With a Nerd
I was a long time advocate of Firefox until 3.x. I don't know if it's the fact that websites are more heavily scripted than before or if Firefox is just getting slower (or both!) but c'mon guys! Speed is key.
Ditto. I loved Phoenix->Firefox for a long time. But it has gotten to be like an old gas guzzling 1970s car! :) I am not sure I agree with the addage that features=bloat=slower application. Well coded applications can add features and not slow down -- it is possible!
What features did they bring over from Chrome?
The new UI is terrible, and appears to be trying to (badly) emulate Chrome. The worst part is that, by default, minimize/maximize/close buttons are not present, which hurts usability badly. The good news is that this can be restored to the previous UI with a few clicks... I hope that options remains present in the final release.
Chromium(Chrome) and Opera are eating their lunch in performance (even IE is kicking their ass), they have started emulating Chromium's look, and they have no presence in the mobile market.
Me thinks rough days are ahead for Mozilla's favorite project.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Do you open flash heavy sites? or sites with video inside? big sites ? For me, all it takes is one site with flash, to take down firefox. I am using Fedora 13 64-Bit. However I do agree that the possible origin of this is flash and not firefox, because normal sites with little or no flash leave firefox stable.
The default theme is very different; personas look better now. Performance is fine; it is faster than before and is roughly identical to Chrome on this computer. Some UI things were changed (for example, the Add-on manager now opens in a tab). All in all, it's a nice release so far.
My guess is these are the same people with like 234324324234234 extensions enabled and think that somehow Firefox should control it if a 14 year old with terrible coding practices makes an unstable extension.
Really, if you only have AdBlock installed, Firefox is pretty stable, and I'm even running nightly builds! It got a bit rocky about a week ago where it wouldn't start correctly and segfaulted when I clicked on a bookmark... But once it updated recently, it works just fine.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
More to the point, they assume it's a problem with Firefox that all other users see, not a problem with how Firefox is installed or configured on their computer, so they don't bother to fix the problem. If they would go discuss the problems at the Mozilla support forum or MozillaZine, they would find that most others are not having these problems.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I'm also using Fedora 13 64-bit with Firefox 3.6.4 and I see no stability problems at all. I open sites with Flash all the time. I'm using the 64-bit Flash version 10.0.45.0. Is there a particular site that gives you trouble?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I'm writing from v.4 now.. and I must say I'm quite underwhelmed. 1) Orange button - make it smaller (icon only), and place it to the left of the tabs. Waste of space having it above them. 2) Tabs - put them at the top. Tabs in the title bar space is a great idea. Don't half-copy chrome. 3) "Always do this" checkbox in download dlg still doesn't work. Nobody cares whether it's the server's config that's at fault: Make that checkbox work. 4) Performance - slowest JS available. Guys. Seriously. What the hell is going on? I've loved firefox since the wee days, but honestly.. this isn't looking good. To the firefox team: please get out of whatever rut you're stuck in, or prepare to be swallowed whole by google.
I knew Firefox was piss slow compared to Chrome, but my god to see how slow is sad. It's why I have been slowly migrating to Chrome where I can, though the lack of some features I need (such as a master password) make Chrome not an option for all the places I need to work.
I hope Firefox starts improving as its add-ins and features will only last so long as the other more modern browsers catch up on features next...
At Javascript, you mean. On Windows XP/7 Firefox seems faster than Chrome at html/images/flash.
And I use chromium, because I don't like Google's or SRWare's spyware ;)
So how can it be my fault if I'm using the plain vanilla installer with a stock configuration?
I am continually baffled by people talking about how unreliable and crash-prone Firefox is.
On my laptop with Windows 7 (and XP before it) I have kept Firefox running for weeks at a time (I hibernate my laptop with Firefox running and hardly ever actually reboot it) under heavy usage; multiple windows, 30+ tabs in each window, many with Flash components and JS-intensive pages. I run Adblock, Noscript, Flashgot, Tree-style Tabs, Lazarus, Form History Control and several other add-ons. Firefox has crashed on me exactly once in the past year or so, and that seemed to be due to Flash. When that happened, Firefox restored my multi-window multi-tabbed session without an issue.
I run Firefox on my desktop workstation as well with similar results. Likewise on a EEE running Ubuntu. Contrary to reports from you and others, I've found it to be one of the most rock-solid application I've ever used.
While I realize anecdotes do not constitute data, I'm curious as to how you and others GET Firefox to crash so regularly!
End of lesson. You may press the button.
>> Well coded applications can add features and not slow down -- it is possible!
Take a look at Opera for an example of this. People may disagree with interface and philosophy of Opera, but it is blazingly fast in Windows.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
A friend of mine just uninstalled foxit reader and stopped complaining....
I can't understand how people bitch continuously and don't even try running in safe-mode.
What are you people doing that causes Firefox to have such horrible stability problems?
Porn. Vast amounts of porn.
I run the portable apps version of FF which takes a very long time to boot so I leave it open as much as possible. Anywhere from 2-20 tabs, usually runs for weeks at a time without problems. Of course, I only have three extensions installed, one that is massively established (adblock), one that is trivial (mobile barcode generator), and one that occasionally causes problems (Ubiquity). I suspect that people with stability and/or memory leak problems are running extensions which are the root cause. Personally, I don't feel that it's fair to let the FF team off the hook for that though, they really need to find a good way to prevent addons from breaking the browser.
I can offer these comments:
a) rendering speed was generally very good
b) while I did not have issues of 'crashing', I did have issues with seemingly random pegging of the cpu.
c) start up time to restore multiple open tabs was unpredictable - sometimes very quick other times never finished (a named tag but blank page)
d) most, if not all, extensions no longer work and the usual workarounds seemed to stop working too. this was #*! annoying.
Based primarily on (d) and also (b), I stopped using 3.7a5 about two weeks ago reverted back to 3.6. While I do have my extensions back, I noticed that 3.6 has developed the (b) problem too. Ultimately this will result in my moving to Opera or Chrome - I'm just sick of browser lock up. And while memory use had looked to have improved going into the 3.6 series, it seems to have gone downhill again - no so much a memory leak but general piggyness (hence Firepig).
I've used Mozilla based browsers since day one, ie, Netscrape. Firefox I think has lost the way again. Simplicity and speed should always be priority #1. Real world usage of Firefox shows that not to be the case any more, or if it is, not done well.
Ok same configuration concerning Firefox and flash version. any particular site ? I would say no. However i can safely say, sites like youtube are safe to open. However I most likely be on course with instability with sites that have more than 1 flash based component inside. Or if I was playing a flash based game. Anyway for more then a week now I switched to Chrome, because it was getting annoying. And I am not sensing any of those problems. I don't have a lot of plugins installed. So ???
I'm not trying to find fault or lay blame. I'm pointing out that it's ridiculous to assume that because you have a problem with Firefox that everyone else sees the same problem. When you go out to your car in the morning and it doesn't start, do you say that your car manufacturer is making defective cars, or do you simply get it fixed? It has nothing to do with whose "fault" it is. It has to do with effectively dealing with problems instead of immediately assuming it is the fault with the manufacturer. Forget about whose fault it is!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
But I always run flashblock yet do allow Flash on certain sites like youtube.
So you might be right, Flash is still the main cause of browser instability.
Yet I thought the idea behind this 'Chromified' is to have tabs and processes run independently and thus a single bad page/tab should not take down the whole application.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
A quad-core with 4gb 800mhz memory is average nowadays ... ?
So enjoy Chrome. Not everyone needs to love Firefox.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Do you open flash heavy sites?
.gif ads that we saw all too much of a few years ago.
Why would we? That's what flashblock is for. Flash is so ubiquitous and typically so devoid of content, there is little to choose between current-day websites populated with shiny widgets and the horrible flashing
I'm not saying that Flash is universally bad or unwholesome (though actually it mostly is), but it hogs bandwidth and mindspace completely unnecessarily. Easier to tune it out; Flashblock lets you decide which bits of content might be worth seeing.
That said, I think too much is being made of this crash issue. I've been using Firefox since it was Phoenix, and I have rarely experienced a browser crash. If you're working it so hard that it swallows up all the RAM on your system, you only have yourself to blame.
It doesn't actually cost you anything to close your browser once in a while, and let your computer clear its decks.
it's funny i start reading this page by pure chance, i was checking the browsing speed i gained after enabling firefox dns prefetch, fasterfox, and combined with local bind9 and squid caching...the result is simply monstruous!!!
needless to say i tested speed against the mammoth that is /. , now i can go back to premium wasting of time here!!!!!
The most up to date thing in my system is the processor, which is about six months old (or, at least, it was released six months ago. I only dropped it in there about a week ago, prior to which I was using an X2 5400+.) Other than that, the newest piece of hardware in my system is the 1.5 T hard drive, and that doesn't really impact performance. The video card, which is close to two years old at this point, is hardly a heavy hitter.
So, yes, by today's standards it is quite out of date. ATI 4850, DDR2 instead of DDR3, the motherboard uses the AMD 780 chipset...it's definitely out of date. Still a great machine that can handle most anything I throw out at, but compared to what's out there, it's out of date.
Living With a Nerd
You all keep talking as if there is some monolithic entity called "firefox", but in fact there are several ports for different OSes. Speaking as a FreeBSD and OS X user, I feel qualified to say those versions are hideously slow and unstable. To me all ff is good for is downloading videos via downloadhelper and checking on my bank account. I suspect the windows version must be the one that works well, that would explain its popularity with windows users. Probably Linux users stick with it for ideological reasons. IME Opera is infinitely superior to ff -- in fact if it had a download video thingie and could access my bank's site I'd never bother with ff again.
I'm baffled why people think SRWare Iron is a reliable source. It's doesn't even have an open repository to check it, only source snapshots. It's from an unknown organization. Why should you trust it more than you trust Google?
"Memory leak" is such a harsh term. It implies poor development practices, poor development tools, and developer negligence. Those are all really bad things, and could make the Firefox developers feel really sad. They might even start crying, and we don't want that. :(
We prefer to describe it as "memory liberation". Instead of being shackled into use storing data against its will, Firefox is compassionate enough to liberate this memory; to set it free, if you will. No longer chained into slavery, the potential of this memory is endless! It could grow up to become a doctor, or a lawyer, an accountant, and maybe even President of the United States of America! It will be able to make a real difference in the world. Thank you, Firefox developers, for caring so much about memory and being such kind, gentle folk.
All the new browser are memory hunger, except firefox which consumes half of ram, and the speed is negligible.
While it slowly builds up to 800MB of RAM used, even though you've closed every tab except for one...
When you go out to your car in the morning and it doesn't start, do you say that your car manufacturer is making defective cars, or do you simply get it fixed?
Actually, I check to see if there's a recall at the NTSB or mycarfacts.com and some other sites to see if I can get fixed for free.
But wait, we're talking about software - an industry where standard procedure is to release shit and have the customer find all the bugs and faults that testing didn't.
And I have a Toyota you insensitive clod!
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Probably using windows...
look here is the deal:
flash is fine.
lets just leave the "proprietary" part aside for the moment.
the reason why "flash sucks" is because the developers cant be asked to optimize their code for memory leaks.
saying "flash sucks" because it makes your browser crash is like saying "c++ sux" because the developer forgot to delete a pointer causing a memory leak to crash yer box. you would never say "c++ sux!". in fact, you might even say the opposite, that it would "blow yer leg off if yer not careful...". i think the same consideration applies to AS3/Flex framework.
optimize your code. profile the flash app. and watch how yer flash experience improves. it really will be stable.
i promise. scout's honor.
if you want a better flash experience than you need to go to the source of the issue: inadvertant memory leaks caused by badly written poorly optimized code that was never, ever profiled.
the problem, however, also lies with Adobe. they continue to market Flash to "designers" who cant program their way out of a paper bag, instead of "developers" who might know a thing or two. and they continue to confuse the issue by having a timeline-based Flash creation tool in addition to their Enterpise-level toolchain that allows "designers" to add hack upon hack upon hack.
this is why "flash sux".
-0.
I think the problem is not in firefox but in the addons, and many addons seem to have very poor memory handling. Almost all of my memory and performance problems went away when I uninstalled FasterFox. I now only have a essential addons -- noscript, flashblock, adblock, and a couple tiny ones. But I think that's why they're going about it the way they are.
Does having a witty signature really indicate normality?
Iron really doesn't provide any advantage over Chrome with regard to privacy.
Reminds me of the cartoon where Dilbert had his PHB searching around under the desk for the token that fell out of the office token ring network.
What are you people doing that causes Firefox to have such horrible stability problems? I leave Firefox open for literally days at a time, with anywhere between 10-25 tabs open, and I have no stability problems.
My guess is that they're all secretly myspace users.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Are there still memory leaks in Firefox?
Anyway most of the time people feel like Firefox is leaking while it isn't, due to caching. At least with verion 3.6.4 you can go to Edit -> Prefferences -> Advanced -> Network and specify the limit of what Firefox may cache.
Give it a try ;)
Here be signatures
You need to install the Flash plugin, then you'll know!
with anywhere between 10-25 tabs open
Ah. I typically have 300-400+ tabs open in multiple windows, for easy of cross-referencing without going backward and forward or digging around in bookmarks and waiting for pages to load. Firefox will randomly lockup once very other week or so (sometimes twice in one day, sometimes it'll be fine for a month). Oddly enough, it's not usually flash that causes the lockup, and memory leakage has never been a problem (rarely tops a gigabyte).
I do love Firefox, I am still using it on my windows machine. But it was getting annoying using it like that. However I hope flash get fixed or canned.
Funny you mention that.
Two weeks ago, I had the following open at the same time (this is in addition to all my other "normal" tabs I leave open, like Facebook, Twitter, etc.): GameTrailers, Newgrounds, Kongregate, and, ::blush:: Redtube. No problems, stability or otherwise.</p><p>For the record, I don't have a crazy PC either...quite average, by today's standards. From my [H]ard|Forum sig:</p><p>Display: Asus VH236H | Dell 2005FPW
Foundation: Cooler Master Storm Scout | OCZ ModXStream Pro 700w
System: Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H | AMD Athlon II X4 635 | Corsair XMS2 4GB DDR2 800 | ATI 4850
Internal Storage: Diamondmax 21 system | WD15EADS archives
External Storage: 1.25TB in a KINGWIN DK-32U-S | WDMER1600TN
Input: Kensington 64325 Expert Mouse | Saitek Eclipse II | M-Audio Axiom 25
Headphones: non-amped Audio Technica ATH-AD700</p></quote>
Nothing about your gear is average, by today's standards. They are mid-tier current.
Why has Mozilla Foundation avoided fixing the biggest bugs in Firefox, the memory leaks? Many, many people have complained about the memory leaks for the last 5 years, at least, as did the parent comment.
Firefox leaks memory and eventually crashes Windows, or makes Windows unstable. Apparently the Firefox memory leak bugs interact with some weakness in Windows XP SP3, and that causes Windows to become unstable. It seems that whoever debugs Firefox might also gain a good reputation from finding a major problem in Windows.
Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. Every new version lists Crashes with evidence of memory corruption as one of the fixes. Those crashes are only the ones automatically reported by the crash reporter. Many of the crashes happen without invoking the crash reporter. Firefox is crashy.
We love Firefox because it has the add-ons we need. But we need it to be stable. I hope version 4 reverses the history of bad management at Mozilla Foundation. Remember, Foundation gets more than $50 million from Google every year to make Google the default search engine.
Mozilla Foundation has an enormous amount of cash: "Total assets as of December 31, 2008 were $116 million, up from $99 million at the end of 2007, an increase of 17% to our asset base." The foundation was run by Mitchell Baker, a lawyer with little or no technical knowledge and very limited social ability. Now that she is Chairwoman and no longer CEO, the management does not seem sufficiently improved.
The parent comment is currently marked "Flamebait". People have commented saying that they have no problems.
Some of the instabilities are difficult to debug because they don't always occur. Visit Mozilla Crash Reporter for more information. Some of the instabilities occur because of the interaction of Firefox with Microsoft Windows, apparently, when Firefox reaches the limit of installed memory and begins to require virtual memory. Firefox is more stable in Linux, apparently.
There is a web page discussing Firefox crashes and what users can do about it.
Look at the current crash statistics.
See the Top 300 Crashing Signatures in the current version of Firefox, 3.6.6.
It seems that an organization that has more than $100 million in assets could stop other work and address the instabilities.
Much more could be written, but that's enough for now.
What is a 'big site'?
I would typically have about 100+ tabs open towards the end of any given browsing day. Towards the end, opening say a Slashdot page would typically bring Firefox to a halt and running flash of any kind (they run anyway despite flashblock) will likely make the browser crash. How much of this is system issues (especially with sound) and how much is Firefox I cannot say, but I can tell you this: Firefox gets slower the more you use the instance. But I can also tell you that Firefox is not using noticeably more memory at the end of the day that at the beginning.
My opinion is that Firefox has a memory fragmentation problem, not a leak problem.
May the Maths Be with you!
Boy, I wish I could mod this up. Iron is definitely a scam. (I was in the chromium irc channel when its developer came on the scene, and he openly admitted he was just playing on people's fears. It seems his goal is to make money with google ads on the download page.) Disclaimer: I used to work on Chromium at Google, now I'm just a happy user.
At least with verion 3.6.4 you can go to Edit -> Prefferences -> Advanced -> Network and specify the limit of what Firefox may cache.
That's the disk cache, not the memory cache.
Also, the numbers reported by Firefox as "used memory cache" are about 10% of the total memory used on my system. So, Firefox claims that only 80MB are used for memory cache, while Windows reports that 800MB is being used by the firefox.exe process.
I typically have 300-400+ tabs open in multiple windows
Good lord, seriously, you're doing it wrong.
30-40 tabs? Fine, whatever. *300-400*? Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? How the hell can you even manage to *find* the tabs you need? What, did you never learn about that fancy feature called "bookmarks"?
Somehow everyone seems to miss, that this “Chromification” actually is a Opera-ism, which was from the very beginning designed like this, because it had tabs from the very beginning.
It’s funny how everything always comes back to Opera’s choices of detail implementation being the best.
I, for one, thank the only innovators in the business. There’s a reason they are the only ones who are remotely profitable with making browsers.
Also: It’s 2010, right? We have mouse gestures, rocker gestures, keys, lots of buttons on the mice... and they are still insulting us with buttons. I mean, back and forward buttons? Really? At least make them only visible in “beginner mode” or something. This is silly.
It’s the same thing that is disturbing me about window management: Using tiny 3px virtual buttons (as opposed to physical ones) and 1px drag areas for window management.
I did away with those things for window management, as soon as I started using Compiz. (Which, opposite to its reputation is actually a much better window manager, when you focus on the shortcuts/mouse actions and windows rules aspects, instead of the bling.)
I use Win+MouseX, where X is one of the 5 buttons of my mouse, and is assigned to moving, resizing, closing, maximizing/restoring and minimizing. With a added Shift key, the buttons are assigned to virtual desktop management. I even removed all task bars. I only toggle the “widget” layer etc by a click in the corner of the screen. Which gives me status infos and allows me to start new apps or open documents. I find it to be extremely easy, fast, and efficient. (I also have keyboard-only alternatives for everything.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
This is the release candidate of the first beta, with the nighties, and not the real beta 1.
I'm running a 3.5.10 build on Snow Leopard right now. I'm a web developer so i have the following extensions installed: Firebug, XMarks, and FireQuery. That's it. I stopped installing extensions when I learned that they could also cause crashes or memory leaks. I've stopped watching flash videos with firefox since it would escalate the software degredation so I watch all my vids in Safari as it doesn't spiral out of control. I never have more than six or seven tabs open at one time. In short, Firefox is really a development tool as I find myself using Safari more and more for recreation since it doesn't die. I tend to avoid flash heavy sites. I would say a lot of ajax heavy sites like the Huffington Post really spike my system resources.
Reading my activity monitor, here's what I find right now for Firefox's process - CPU 26.7%, 27 Threads, 530 megs of memory. My current tabs: Safari Books Online, Kotaku, Google Search Results, an html ebook, an energy drink site (current client), and slashdot. Mind you ... no video is running. In a few hours, my memory will spike to a gig whereby the browser will falter then fail. This has happened on both XP, Leopard, and Snow Leopard.
I'm not trolling. I've used Mozilla products since the suite back in 2001. I know the prevailing groupthink here is to blame the messenger when reporting firefox problems but this is actually happening under normal conditions.
This man is clearly an ego-stroking troll. A rare breed, if I ever there was one! ;)
[UID-HeinzIntel]
"Faster" and "more secure" are sexy new features. "Fixed memory leak we were blaming on plug-ins/add-ons/users/Microsoft/cosmic rays anyway" doesn't make such a good headline.
I thought the point of the Mozilla Foundation was to employ people to fix these kinds of un-sexy bugs that were being ignored by OS developers. Instead they seem to just want to break people's workflows as often as possible. "Innovation" (or in this case copying Chrome) for the sake of itself is not the same as "making it better".
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It is this spyware aspect of Chrome that bothers me most. OK, it is reasonably snappy (but so is FF if you don't overload it), and the UI is OK if you happen to like it. (I'm not a huge fan, but I'm quite happy to admit that's just me.)
But the handful of extensions that I find most useful with FF are exactly those that Google has no commercial interest in permitting to function, so I'll leave Chrome to those who like it. Memory use isn't an issue at all: none of my machines are that powerful by today's standards, but I NEVER have problems with Firefox swamping my RAM. I would contend that anyone who finds that it does so should take a good look at how they are using it. Think of it like this (and no, I will NOT use a car analogy):
If you work a power-tool really hard, you have to allow intervals where you let it cool down and you take time to sharpen the cutting edges. Similarly, it makes sense to close your browser (or any non-trivial program for that matter) occasionally and allow the OS to do its garbage collection as best it can.
If you want something fixed, you need to show how it negatively impacts FARMVILLE. That @#@$@% application is driving everything now.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
That joke is WAY older than Dilbert.
10-25? Try 100-250. I do that with no problem at all, thanks to NoScript and Adblock.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
most of those set to ADD and OCD forums, I'll warrant.
Stay relevant: See the Top 300 Crashing Signatures in the latest version, Firefox 3.6.6. Those are just the top 300. They don't include the crashes that don't invoke the crash reporter.
Often Slashdot discussions are degraded by people trying to make jokes.
You can disable most of the spying, or just use Chromium (the community build) instead.
As for memory use, lower memory usage isn't everything. I could go into detail about how an OS manages memory and so "XXXmb used" does not translate to actual RAM used, but the bottom line is programs using memory is not necessarily a bad thing if it makes them run better with minimal disruption to other apps. Since Firefox is by far the most heavily used app on my system and I have plenty of RAM I bumped the memory cache size up a lot to keep it moving when I have a lot of tabs open.
Consider also that Google view the browser as the OS anyway, with apps just being web sites, so it makes sense for their browser to put web app performance above low memory usage. The benefits of having each tab run in a separate process outweigh the additional memory costs too IMHO.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Bookmarks require you to reload the page, and are just a list anyway, with limitations on linking to specific locations on a page. Remembering where a few hundred tabs are is pretty easy (remember a few key tabs, remember the others in relation to those key tabs, judicious use of the crtl+tab(+shift) shortcuts), far easier than trying to wrangle any of the various 'content organiser' programs I've tried into a useful tool. The organisation software installed in my own brain still beats any I've installed on my computer thus far.
I like to think of each window with tabs as a stack. One page leads you to another, push another tab on the stack. When you're done with that task, pop the tab off the stack. Bookmarks are too permanent. I may never need that tab again. But I might, so I'm glad it's there when I get back to it. Lots of times I'll come to a stopping point and close a bunch of tabs, going back a week or more. Then I'll dig up some tab that I had entirely forgotten about, would not have cared enough to bookmark, but it serves as a good start for more browsing.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
See this post if you are curious ... while you may be having the optimal experience, many of us are not - http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1702398&cid=32733482
So, let me get this straight. Before making sure you have gas, etc., you immediately run in the house and check the internet for recalls and shit? You are a fucking liar. And you got modded up. Proof that this website is populated by 12 year olds who's only experience with driving is waiting for dad to pass out from the booze and lifting the keys out of his pocket.
So Firefox memory usage goes up when you use it like a fucking moron? They should just hard cap the number of tabs so that you fools stop making their application look bad when it's the user's fault.
This much more detailed comment occurs much later in the discussion because it was moved down by comments that are mostly unhelpful or irrelevant: Firefox is the most unstable program in common use
Firefox leaks memory and eventually crashes Windows, or makes Windows unstable.
Yet back when I was still using Windows I'd typically only shut down Firefox because of a Firefox update requiring a restart or Windows Update requiriing a reboot. And I don't remember Firefox ever crashing.
Obviously it must crash or we wouldn't have those crash reports, but I haven't seen it crash on Windows in at least a couple of years. So I could hardly call it 'unstable'.
The organisation software installed in my own brain still beats any I've installed on my computer thus far.
But is it open source?
;)
What is a 'big site'?
Your mom's bedroom? She had to make sure it met fire codes for occupancy of up to 24 people, for professional reasons.
Bow-ties are cool.
I would recommend the following:
Release versions have been quite unstable on Flash heavy sites some time ago. I have switched to nightly builds several months ago and - barring the occasional hiccup when new features are introduced - have found it to run incredibly stable and performant even with a larger selection of extensions installed.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
Bookmarks require you to reload the page, and are just a list anyway,
a) Reloads... who really cares?
b) No, they're a complete hierarchy for organization. They're only a list if you don't know how to use 'em.
But, whatever, if that's how you want to use FF, hey, go nuts. But don't complain if it starts to behave strangely. Any sane person should realize you're *way* outside of the "supported functionality" envelope and are basically abusing the tabbed browsing metaphor (badly).
This account is wrong. Mozilla has not shipped Firefox 4 beta yet. We are in the process of making and testing the final set of changes, but we're not quite there yet.
- Asa Dotzler
Mozilla
Have you tried Read It Later? Seems like that might fit your browsing model.
If you don't like the state in which Mozilla releases Firefox, then don't buy it, or take it back for a refund!.... oh wait...
Yes. It's called Chrome. The day I discovered the WebKit development tools in Chrome was the day I switched from Firefox, and Chrome did a nice job of porting all my bookmarks and such. I really like Firefox but the reality is that all too frequently becomes unstable and requires me to shut it down and restart it, or worse, kill it. As a bonus it has the super special ability to slow down all my other apps when it become unstable.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Hardly "way older".
Dilbert RSS feed
I don't believe you. Post a screenshot with 300+ tabs open (and also the RAM usage). I'm also pretty sure it wouldn't be usable like that. How do you find anything?
That's the disk cache, not the memory cache. It doesn't appear you can set an explicit limit on the size of the memory cache (which is a good thing, as doing so below an optimal size would only slow down Firefox needlessly).
Right now I have MORE tabs open on firefox than I do on Chome. Firefox is using ~220MB private bytes, Chrome is using ... *adds up the 10 freaking processes*... 640MB (651MB if you count the googletalkplugin.exe).
This is OK on my development machine here, because I have 8GB, but I could see where someone with only 1-2GB might not like Chrome. It would constantly cause paging.
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
I can corroborate that; No crash in Debian Linux Sid for more than four months. Also, although it uses plenty of memory, it doesn't grow continually.
Maybe it's a Windows problem, not a Firefox one?
Dilbert RSS feed
In a true memory leak, Firefox will keep allocating memory until it hits an out of memory exception and the OS kills it. When it grows to a point and stops there, that's intentional.
I'm not trying to find fault or lay blame...Forget about whose fault it is!
...says the person whose fault it IS!
My 400E PC (not especially expensive) has a quadcore and 4GB DDR3.
Maybe not exactly average, but it's definitively mid to low end in terms of new PCs nowadays. In desktops, of course, laptops are always behind.
Dilbert RSS feed
Doesn't really work in Chrome itself: VLC is always crashing the whole browser (and even more than one browser window!) if I close the tab during playback.
Dilbert RSS feed
"So I could hardly call it 'unstable'."
202,704 crashes in the latest version in the last 14 days.
Those crashes do NOT include the crashes that also crash the crash reporter. Notice that almost all the crashes were observed only in Windows. That may partly reflect the fact that Windows users are much more common.
You make a lot of good points but there are a lot of holes as well you should be aware of.
...what? Ok first of all, there is a explicit barrier between kernel land and user land. In kernel land, bugs crash the OS. These are blue screens. In user land, bugs crash the individual programs that cause them. Firefox limits the amount of memory it uses in an attempt to be sure plenty is left free for breathing space. Short of a malfunctioning driver (not Firefox's fault) it's simply not as easy as you seem to imply for an OS crash to happen. Sometimes some apps include drivers than run in kernel space but Firefox is not one of them.
Somehow I doubt that. Businesses run all sorta of old legacy programs (and normal consumers do too) which I imagine would be far more unstable than a modern browser coded for and tested on modern OSs. To your credit, flash is responsible for lots of browser crashes (had a few Flash crashes last week myself) thanks to Firefox 3.6.4 maybe we'll see an improvement there.
Apparently, you don't quite known how memory management works in operating systems. The OS will swap process memory in and out of RAM/virtual memory all the time, a big time is when process switching or minimizing/restoring windows. The less physical RAM you're using and the more total memory is in use, the more swapping, of course. But Windows will not simply wait for physical memory to fill before starting to use virtual memory; it keeps a good chunk of physical memory free so that when it's needed Windows can provide it immediately rather than having to swap stuff to disk first. Furthermore the management of virtual memory is done entirely by the OS; apps cannot access physical or virtual memory directly and I find the idea that Firefox somehow has problems with it doubtful at best. I also doubt this is related to Linux stability since Linux does much the same memory management stuff AFAIK.
Be a little more realistic. I doubt they are sitting around all day and throwing parties. Contrary to popular belief, debugging is hard. Debugging bugs that cannot be reliably reproduced can be near impossible. Unreliable bugs also crash less, which means they're less likely to make the top crashers, and guess which bugs are the most important to fix first?
I would also like to point out the top crasher in your link looks like a Skype Extension DLL and not actually a Firefox component.
4 years in computing is "way older".
I don't understand why SRWare Iron is any better. Do you trust the SRWare people more than you trust the Google people? I'm not saying either is untrustworthy, btw - just that I don't see the point here, you just shifted your trust from Google to SRWare.
But to say something substantial, then I would trust Google and Mozilla with respect to their open source code. That means Chromium and Firefox - not Chrome. Chrome, unlike Chromium and Firefox, comes with lots of closed-source code - for example, Flash, but Google have honestly disclaimed that there is more, and it's good of them to make a clear distinction between Chromium and Chrome (it lets us make an informed choice which to use. I wouldn't use Chrome, but I would use Chromium). Finally, I would trust SRWare Iron the least - who I only know about from their website, which self-describes themselves as "SRWare is a software company, which is specialized on Hardware-, Software- and Onlinesolutions. Our target is focusing on Quality, reliability and usability, which we can provide you since four years."
That's not a problem I've ever had either, and the ticketing system we use at work is (unfortunately) flash-based. I've left Firefox open with 5-10 tabs, including the ticket system, for weeks at a time without it crashing. Granted, this is with the newest flash on Windows 7 x32, so YMMV. At home I don't typically leave Firefox open longer than when I'm using it, but that usually spans four to five hours with multiple tabs as well, though there I tend to avoid the flash sites out of principle. One notable exception is that my wife watches YouTube for hours on end, and the worst that happens there is high memory usage.
I have just installed the published version of firefox 4 beta and have realized it does not have the buttons on the top right corner to minimize the application.
This is odd
Haha, I read that as: "... is running more smoothly and with faster crashes."
'When the Going gets Weird, the Weird turn Pro.' - Hunter S. Thompson
Firefox also provides tags for bookmarks and live bookmark search (using tags, URL, or title) in the AwesomeBar. There's no excuse.
I would also point out that this crash information isn't available from some other browsers, so to say firefox is the most unstable is a bit silly if we don't have all the crash information.
To take the other end of the argument, you can't say that "flash crashes aren't firefox's fault" then turn around and say "I hope version x improves flash performance". In the end I would argue that most of the stability issues with these plug-ins are likely in the interface, so crashers could lie on either side of the aisle (and be fixed, sloppily, from both sides as well).
As far as os level memory allocation goes, in theory memory allocation is abstracted. In theory a software developer doesn't need distinguish where the resources are stored. There is theory then there is actually using C .
I work for a Fortune 50 that sells a product many would describe as slow and bloated. The former is true because of the latter, and the latter is true because of demand. When the product was younger it was sleek and fast. As a product tacks on features it necessarily becomes slower to accommodate them. There are possibly exceptions to that rule, but not many. Browsers are not an exception.
Either the software initializes the subsystem to support a feature at startup, or (as they usually try to do) it's initialized in the background. Unfortunately someone will come up with a killer use for that feature (either internally or externally) that requires support during startup. Invariably that means startup is slower. Tack on intricate and complex dependencies, eventually everything gets initialized at startup. Not to mention that once you ship a product, those APIs are officially supported, no matter how well they were thought out or how early they were introduced.
The perceived result is bloatware, yet there's nothing in the product except features that were demanded by the users. Firefox certainly isn't perfect, and I'm sure the developers would love to rewrite portions of the product, but most of those rewrites will gain maintainability rather than performance. Performance is usually something you squeeze out of what's already there, and both Chrome and Mozilla engineers are very capable at spotting opportunities.
It's worth noting that crash rates have been driven down significantly recently. They are indeed addressing the instabilities and tackling the problem like you demand. Pretty graphs and charts (also read the comments from Mozilla devs): http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2010/04/08/dramatic-stability-improvements-in-firefox/
The fact that Mozilla still gets the majority of money from Google doesn't mean they're not looking for other sources of income.
The Moz Foundation hasn't published a financial report since 2008. Tax Returns and Financial Information
It is really, really, tough to get good, hard numbers on the financial state of the Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation
Indeed.
To the AC that responded to my "specs" post, keep in mind that the Athlon II X4 635 is the top of the Athlon II line of quad cores...and it cost $99. AMD's top of the line flagship quad-core processor is only ~$170 (The Phenom II X4 965 BE.) That's their flagship quad core., and it's only around $170.
Living With a Nerd
Mozilla corporation seems to be pretty badly run. They solicited donations for the NYT ad(some of my poor college friends scraped together money for it) while overpaying the CEO($500K per year)! The management was supposed to find different ways of getting funding but Mozilla is still dependent totally on Google(which competes with it's own rival browser). Mozilla made $66 million in revenue just in 2006 while development was largely done by unpaid volunteers.
So your friends scraped together money for a corporation that is netting $46M/year (2007)?
Also, for a company that made $46M, a CEO salary of $500K doesn't seem completely unreasonable. It does beg the question: how many people are getting paid to develop Mozilla products, vs. how many are still open source community members?
I also wonder where all that money is going- let's remember that is NET INCOME, not revenue. If they're saving it up to have an endowment and be free(er) from Google and company, wonderful.
Please help metamoderate.
the answers to your two questions:
> How many people knows about "about:config", or wants to?
are actually the same, which is exactly why Firefox will continue to survive. Point is: if you want the configuration options, then they're there for you. But if you don't it's not like it's the only way that you can access them. They provide the best of both worlds in this respect and as such will continue to maintain a user base.
Fact of the matter is, maybe Firefox needs to suffer a little bit so that they can realize, much like they did when they splintered Firefox (then Phoenix) off of the main Mozilla browser, that they need to make some effective changes in order to maintain market share.
I encourage this. And the point isn't that FF is the best alternative, but that they're good enough to drive the commercially-driven models up to their standard. It's arguable that without Firefox, IE8 never would have been the bastion of standards compliance that it (debatably) currently is. We would still be dealing with the same kind of authoritarian "We're the biggest browser so just make your website compatible to us" attitude that formed the behemoth known as IE6.
I think the point of Open Source Software isn't that it should act as a full-on replacement for commercial software. But at least they can set the standard - comply to this level of quality, or your business model is going to fail, because ours is essentially free and if it's better nobody is going to want your product.
So I got it installed and tried it out, nothing strenuous at all. I was glad to see adblock plus available for it.
However the next time I started it, it "upgraded" itself to 3.6.6. Anyone else have this happen too?
"Good lord, seriously, you're doing it wrong."
No need to be so intolerant towards different customs or beliefs!
It's not as if he's using emacs, after all...
Karma? What's that again?
Funny, I didn't mean to be "trolling" . My original comment went from +3 Insightful to Troll! Yikes, sorry to say something negative about Slashdot's pet project! I will know better next time.
I don't know if I'd call it Flash heavy, but I wrote a banner in Flash (Actually FlashDevelop using the Flex compiler) for one of our internal sites that's fairly basic and calls JS on page to simplify the layout of the page a bit. (allowed us to create a dynamic header based on content, user preference, minor animations, etc.)
I frequently work on pages within this site and even if I have several pages open (each with their own flash banner) for pretty much my entire work week, I have practically no issues with memory leaks. Granted, I did have problems with Firebug memory leaks so I do have to be a little aware if I have the "network tab" enabled, but that's not because of Flash.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Here is what SRWare says. http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php
Unless of course he was joking...
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Any particular reason why you run an outdated build? Not trolling, just wondering.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
It appears hardware accelerated rendering is disabled by default. To enable, navigate to about:config, set the following setting to true. gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled
I hibernate my laptop with Firefox running and hardly ever actually reboot it
You sir, are destroying the planet :D
Ah well, at least your doing it in a stylish open source way.
Seriously. Complaining about Firefox instability when running hundreds of tabs simultaneously is like eating 10 burgers a day from McDonalds every day for a month and then complaining about how McDonalds is unhealthy when you gain a bunch of weight and suffer a heart attack.
Probably a bad analogy because McD's is rather unhealthy, but I'm sure you get the point.
Quite a bit of work on memory usage and fragmentation was done for Firefox 3. See this blog. Personally I have no problem with stability or memory usage.
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think. --Niels Bohr
When I did a clean install of Snow Leopard, I found the latest Firefox to be incredibly slow so I downgraded to test my results. I later found that the issue wasn't firefox, but rather a proxy issue. I'll probably upgrade in the next month or so.
Your comparison of Flash with C++ is not very fitting, because C++ apps are not something that is arbitrarily executed and displayed automatically when a user visits a website.
Sadly, the only defense we have against jackass Flash developers who make CPU-hogging Flash banner-ads and the web devs that put two or three of those ads on a single page is Flashblock. Personally, I'm pretty happy with NoScript...
Sounds like you just need to stop visiting TV Tropes.
The Chrome team watches pretty carefully for performance regressions, see http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/perf/dashboard/overview.html The buildbot will go red if there's a big one, and people watch the graphs for creeping regressions.
You saw that movie too? Pretty ridiculous, huh?
Firefox developers know that their product will be used on Windows; they promote such usage. Through their collection of crash reporter data over several years and versions, they have reason to know about the common ways in which Windows fails when used in conjunction with Firefox. Not defending against such classes of failures (with code, documentation, education, or other means) when Mozilla knows and want their software to be used in conjunction with known and common failure modes is at least irresponsible on the personal part of each contributor, if not outright unprofessional of the developers and the organization.
The cleaning agent companies figured this out long ago, and responsibly advertise "do not mix X with Y" since they know the combination is harmful. Going back to 3.6 (if not much earlier), Mozilla knows that mixing Firefox, Skype, and Windows causes badness.
Even in the unlikely event that Skype and Microsoft are both completely uncooperative, a responsible thing to do would be to advertise "do not mix Firefox, Skype, and Windows under such and such circumstances" since Mozilla can anticipate the failure of their own product, and the negative impression of Firefox that such failure should leave upon the user.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Try running without a page file (because Windows is stupid enough to swap everything out to disk even though the RAM isn't nearly full, slowing everything down if you've got a slow hard drive)...
With 2GB of RAM I frequently had the following scenario: ~1.2GB of RAM used by Windows and misc apps (Winamp, Pidgin, Thunderbird, OneNote and a few others... nothing major). Enter Firefox... half an hour later, "Low Memory, please end programs...". Firefox memory usage with only a single Gmail tab open: ~800MB
Restart Firefox, back to 100MB of memory usage. Meeeeeehhh...
I know we all have our own ways of doing things, and our own needs, and we each do what works for us.
But Jesus Christ I cannot comprehend a situation that would lead to so many tabs open on a so-called "normal" browsing session! Do you folks compulsively open every link in a new tab? Is there a reason you never close a tab when you're done with it? Do your Back and Forward buttons not work properly? I ask these question out of complete curiosity, not to flame.
I've had it crash on Debian and Ubuntu, but that's usually Flash's fault or nspluginwrapper, the most evil piece of software ever invented.
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
Flash also has a retarded garbage collector that's incapable of cleaning up large objects. Oh, and you can't force it to do a cleanup, so if it decides your object is too big, it's stuck in memory forever. Good luck optimizing that.
Linkey: http://www.andymoore.ca/2010/03/motherfucking-as3-garbage-collection/
That takes additional effort to save something for later. Failing to close a tab takes zero thought on my part, and negligible system resources. So I just let them pile up.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That takes additional effort to save something for later.
How so? There's literally a click-to-save mode. Click a link, it's saved. It's exactly as easy as using Ctrl+click to open a tab. Easier, in fact.
Failing to close a tab takes zero thought on my part, and negligible system resources. So I just let them pile up.
Which is precisely how Read It Later is meant to work. You build up a reading queue, then go through it at your leisure. You can even use it on multiple devices and across browsers.
Honestly, I'm at a loss to understand your objections, here. But again, meh, if you want to abuse the tab metaphor, so be it. Just don't complain when FF doesn't exhibit the kind of stability you expect.
- So what is it? A beta, or a release candidate?
- Let's call it Beta-candidate
I wouldn't complain about it on my own (since FF is free and I'm grateful it exists in the first place since it got me away from my abusive marriage with IE =p) but since the subject has arisen, it freezes up like an ice demon every time I load /.
This is the only site I've ever seen that I cannot count on just loading up in tabs (say, a set of 5-6 stories that I've selected) without a hitch. No crashes until I click on the busy FF window, at which point it's all "this program has stopped responding". Is there anything I can do about this?
Strangely enough, flash heavy sites just don't kill FF for me (because I use flashblock and only enable the flashlets that contain the vids I wanna watch instead of the entire bevy of ads and crapware floating around on most flash sites). So yes, for the most part, I'd agree with you (person I replied to) that stability problems are rather strange. Perhaps an overabundance of addons?
Maybe my reading of it is wrong. I thought it would be an extra button you had to click in order to save, instead of automatically saving any and every time you click a link. If it's the latter, that is pretty nifty.
Looking at the extensions site, it looks like click to save doesn't display the page in firefox. I'd want both, show me the page and save it. Save all tabs could be very useful though.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Just because Mozilla gives out a half-assed product for free doesn't mean that it can't be criticized.
Running it on Linux.
That was my observation, anyway, until I gave up waiting for them to fix it and switched to Chrome.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Yes, but you obviously don't check the memory usage as he does, I have used many tabs and left firefox open for days on end as well, and have noticed taskmanager slowly climbing while FF is open, showing no signs of stopping, so I do what I need and sometimes just force close and restores sessions to get back some memory, but for his problem where users/clients might be using it for office documents (openoffice.org) as excel spreadsheets or what not, it might be a disaster waiting to happen...
I am very happy with FF, but sometimes wonder if my copy i downloaded might have been MiM attacked
and swapped with a diff. version, I have 8 computers in all at home and all run diff. version each of FF (too lazy to upgrade all of them)....so I see the memory leaks....although one version (forget which) had been stabilized maybe 3.1...and then the whole started again with the newer version.
my fault for not keeping up to date, but I understood his point above
Personally I started having stability issues with Firefox 3 (it hardly ever crashed on me before). I guess you don't have your Firefox open for weeks (and yes, several crashes have been in the night or over weekend when I wasn't touching it for quite some time, and without any active plugin content).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Make sure to plug your ethernet, lest somebody passes out from the fumes.
maybe he just wont let go of his 2400 baud?
Balderdash!
Bullshit
I often leave Firefox open for literally weeks at a time. Well, provided it survives as long. It seldom crashes in the first week, though.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Iron really doesn't provide any advantage over Chrome with regard to privacy.
For what it's worth, I can confirm the logs that evmar posted. They begin at September 17, 2008, 3:00:30 PM EST in my logs for #chromium-dev on freenode. I idled in that channel since shortly after the Chromium release was announced. I'm not a Google employee or Chrome/Chromium developer, but I have used Chrome as my browser for over a year (IIRC).
Salient quotes from the log:
Iron is a complete scam, avoid it. If you're worried about privacy, use Chromium compiled by your distro (don't want MS or Apple to get info about you, right?) and turn off everything that sends data to Google.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
The worst type of bug reports are along the lines of: ...) ...)?)
1/ it does not work (what does not work? what steps did you do? what are you expecting to happen? what operating system are you running on?
2/ it crashes
3/ it is leaking memory (what usage pattern? what were you doing? what site(s)/image/document/... were you viewing/printing/...? what is your system like (graphics card, amount of memory,
The more details people can provide to the developers of any application, the better they can investigate and track down the issue(s).
The worst types of bug are the ones where:
1/ they only happen when the planets are aligned correctly (i.e. very infrequently)
2/ they happen due to interaction between two threads
3/ they don't/do happen when you turn on diagnostics/tracing
4/ they don't happen when you debug the application
Having a clear, repeatable test case (doing X then Y then Z will always trigger the issue) makes it easier to track down. The bugs that are hard to reproduce and track down take the longest to fix and may require very specific domain knowledge of the operating system, APIs being used, programming language and the actual codebase.
Have you tried.... not being a moron? It's a good place to start.
Windows is stupid enough to swap everything out
No, it's you who is following some cargo cultic advice and noticing the placebo speed-up. Windows is always going to write lazily to the page file so that when you need a lot of memory in a hurry, it doesn't need to page anything out to disk, it just reallocates the physical memory of some pages that have been marked as already copied to the swap file. If you don't use need that memory for something else then, yes it will be in the swap file, but it will still be in RAM ready to be accessed instantly if you need it again. In any case, don't take my word for it, people no less knowledgable than, Mark Russinovich recommend having a page file (as well as how to figure out how big you need it to be). Yes you can run without a page file, but then you'll run into the "Low Memory" issue long before that memory is actually used, and you forfeit the ability to save crash dumps, and you gain next to nothing for speed.
Something can be borked about my hardware, like trying to run my car in -40C (or F) or whatever. But software doesn't break down the way cars do, unless cosmic rays flipped a bit in my executable. If cars worked as unreliably as browsers, in that if you hit exactly this curve under exactly those conditions while shifting gears and braking slightly the car would spontaneously combust there'd be a recall. If fact, if you're verified it on two machines of different setup I think you can safely assume this is a problem affecting most of them, at least on the same platform and such. It's just a question of how rarely the circumstances of the crash appear and if it's specific to exactly what you're doing.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Firefox rarely crashes on me, but, it does have quite the appetite for memory (though, to be fair, I rarely notice or care).
I'm running a fairly fresh instance of FF 3.6.6 on Win7, only one other tab open, and it's averaging about 145MB (it keeps fluctuating from 143 to 148, but spends most of its time at 144MB).
What I find amusing is that I'm also running Ubuntu 10.4 in a VirtualBox VM, running a couple terminals, hi-res wallpaper, compiz enabled with 3d cube rotation, and Chrome with the same two tabs open, and the entire VM w/the OS + Chrome is only consuming 114MB.
I'd bet VirtualBox is using using some more memory that isn't showing up in task manager, such as drivers and the like, but I still find it amusing.
"This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel...total loss of all basic motor skills: Blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue-severance of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting, because the brain continues to function more or less normally...you can actually watch yourself behaving in the terrible way, but you can't control it."
-Hunter S Thompson
;)
What would one of these bugs or flaws be, specifically, in Firefox? I see very vague complaints about "memory leaks" or "bloat" but never, ever any specific problem that others can plainly see. Why is that?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
They did fix the memory leaks. I have seen test after test that shows that Firefox uses less memory than other browsers. If you think you see a memory leak, explain how we could all see the problem. Then we can file a bug report and the problem can be fixed.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Nah. It's been working out for me so far.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I don't have any issue with stability or memory either. I was getting some crashing but it stopped when I changed network cards.
It's a bit of a long story but I noticed that Media Player Classic would crash when playing WMV videos over the network and it seem to happen more often when an RDP session was open. Much fiddling around later and I eventually got an Intel PCI-E gigabit ethernet card to replace the crappy on-board nVidia LAN I was using previously. After that it stopped crashing and so did Firefox.
Well, saying that, I do get the odd crash when opening Firefox as it tries to restore my tabs. Open it a second time and it's fine. Sometimes it forgets the open tabs too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
And how many people have actually found memory leaks? How many people just think they're the victim of a memory leak, and actually don't understand what Firefox (or its plugins) are doing? How do you even know that they specifically aren't fixing memory leaks?
Seriously, your whole post is just badly thought out.
Hi Richard, is that you?
It nearly never crashes for me, but after an hour it tends to use 25-99% of CPU. At the moment I have 4 tabs open and it is using nearly 500MB. Firefox 3.5.9 on Kubuntu Karmic. I have to "killall firefox" before trying to us another application, which isn't so bad as the session restore feature brings me instantly back to where I was. I prefer it overall to Chrome except for playing Flash videos, where Chrome plays back smoothly but Firefox judders to a halt.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
It's fine to criticize it, but I notice no one is pointing out any specific problems that can be confirmed as Firefox bugs. It's always anecdotes about "memory leaks" and crashes ad vague claims about "bloat", and no one ever gives instructions for how to reproduce the problem. If your assertion is that Firefox is half-assed product, what is a specific problem that we can all see?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Every browser does that. I suppose you either don't use other browsers or don't watch the memory usage like a hawk when using those browsers, so you don't notice.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
(Different poster here)
But what's abusive about it? That style of browsing, to me, is what tabs are for. It's what they've always been for. It's frustrating to have to reset about:config to have a single red "X" at the far right of the screen every time I switch machines (because I neither want, nor need, the horizontal space wasted by movable "X"s to which I might have to mouse), but I don't need anything more than a pixel or two of the favicon to know where I am in the stack. Frankly, I could do without the favicon altogether. A character or two of the title, "Wi" vs "Fa" would tell me whether I was on the "Windows..." or the "Failed Windows install" thread in my current situation, which is more than I'm seeing right now, as all there's room for (I've edited tab.minwidth too) right now is the favicon. (although it'd suck on "Sl..."ashdot comments :)
Presumably I'm also "abusing" the tab metaphor, which indicates to me that you somehow know what the "right way" to use tabs is. So anyways, what's the "official" way in which one is "supposed" to use tabs?
Because if it's not as a stack, then I've been missing something since Mozilla 0.x. I don't mean to come off as belligerent here, but I'm genuinely curious as to what point I've supposedly been missing.
(Some other guy in the thread wrote)
The root cause of the 100+ tab phenomenon is that web forums typically paginate every "n" pages for some ridiculously small value of "n", so something as short as a 50-post thread, at 10 posts per page, necessitates 5 more tabs. That's a web design problem designed to alleviate load on the database server that's retrieving the posts, or maximize banner ad impressions, or some combination of both. (I've never had stability problems, but I've always browsed with Javascript/Flash off. When I browse for content/research, I'm after text, not videos, because (espeically with 100+ tabs open to cover 5-10 potential answers to my question) I don't have time to watch 5-10 videos for the one or two explanatory sentences that'll solve my problem.)
1) Yes. It's a stack. I don't want to read, evaluate, and then click "back", losing context. I *DO* want to mindlessly (really, I'm in navigate and grab everything that's possibly relevant mode, not read, think and evaluate mode) pop open every link in a new tab.
2) I close 'em when I'm done with 'em, but that's probably not for another 10-15 minutes. After I've got the 100 tabs open, I start reading, using ^W to close the windows as I work my way through the stack, and optionally opening up another stack of 5-10 tabs if I come across something that really *is* relevant. Web forums are often hierarchical, so I've got a starting list of, say, 3-5 subforums ("Hardware fixes", "Software fixes", "Related bugs", "For Sale: Tools to fix it", which stay open, but each of them will spawn at least 3-4 tabs for "threads under each forum", and each of those threads will spawn 1-10+ tabs for each paginated thread.)
3) When I'm reading, my brain is in reading mode, not back/forward/navigating mode. I'm focusing on the content I've downloaded in step 1, and not remotely interested in clicking "back" to return to navigation/searching-for-more-content mode. 80-90% of the tabs I've opened in stage 2 are getting closed, and when I find myself with nothing left but the root subforums from stage 2, I click "next page" on each of the root subforums, and repeat.
But what's abusive about it? That style of browsing, to me, is what tabs are for.
I'm sorry, no, that's absolutely false.
The tab metaphor was *never* intended to accomodate *hundreds* of live tabs. If it were, there would be better mechanisms for organizing tabs, finding them, etc. No, the tab metaphor is meant for *maybe* dozens of tabs, tops.
Flash-Block is the only thing that saves this machine, but whether it's a Flash or a Firefox-Flash issue, I'm not sure.
Ibid.
also known as a BBW site. lots of big tits.
Ahem. I mostly use Firefox but there is a Flashblock for Chrome. In fact, there are at least 2. The new version of AdBlock Plus for Chrome really blocks most of the adverts, not just hides them. There are also versions of Adblock Plus and FlashBlock for Opera. I'm pretty sure there's also FlashBlock for IE. tl;dr: There are working versions of FlashBlock and AdBlock Plus for all the major browsers.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
Mozilla is working on MSI packages for Firefox. If you have 1337 hax0r skills, try dropping by mozilla.bugzilla and help them.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
This comparison completely glosses over the client ID removal, which is the main reason most people are interested in Iron. The comparison apparently considers "The Client ID of the browser is wiped out" a 'minor tweak'. It's major to some of us.
Again with the SRWare Iron hate? Does Iron deliver what it promises to deliver? Resounding yes. Is Iron code different from Chrome? Yes, only a few lines, but that was the deal: A Chrome mod stripped from the questionable parts. I read the logs and the history of Iron and I don't see the big scam. The guy created a product that works as advertised and, due to Germany's anti-Google stance, people there are more likely to go for a de-Googlefied Chrome, therefore _sometimes_ visiting SRWare's website to download it, maybe generating some bucks via adSense or by using some of the other products SRware offers. He was mainly after the good publicity –The guy who stripped Chrome from the bad parts. He got it. He delivered a product that works as promised. Where's the scam? Loads of money? Pics or it didn't happen. Malware. No. Spyware. No. Iron's code is free to download and examine by anyone with the skills to do so. Seriously, you guys presenting the IRC logs as evidence that Iron is a money-making scam should read them again. The fellow/s behind Iron created a Chromium mod that works just as advertised. The creators of ChromePlus did the same with their Chromium mod; the creator of PaleMoon and CometBird did the same with their Firefox mods. Iron's home page is full of nasty ads... Use an adblocker or download Chromium elsewhere. tl;dr: Iron works as advertised. No scam.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
To avoid Google-tracking you can try Chromium, SRWare Iron and ChromePlus.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
I found one site that consistently causes both Chrome and FF (on Linux) to hog memory is Facebook. On FF, I have Flashblock and Adblock, so it's not Flash that causes this.
Personally I think some kind dock like interface would be interesting. Something that merges permanent bookmarks, live tab pages, cached history, rss feeds, stuff I've marked to read later etc. All into one great big tree structure. With simple bookmarking (like pinning it), deletion / closing.
The current tab model keeps all the layout information in memory. While I might currently use a tab to keep something around as a kind of short lived bookmark, I don't really care if the state of the page is serialized to cache and dropped from ram. I just don't want to fetch it from the net when I go back to it.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
saying "flash sucks" because it makes your browser crash
Is absolutely correct. Flash is supposed to provide a sandbox to insulate me from content written by morons.
When (not if) flash sucks and makes your browser crash, your OS will not crash. This is because your OS doesn't suck.
The JavaScript interpreter in my browser does a similar job, but it doesn't suck. Bad JS doesn't crash my browser, and if it starts whoring CPU then I get a little box saying "This shit has been suspended for whoring CPU, but you can let it continue if you really want".
Flash sucks. If you want flashy sandboxed apps all up in your browser go with Silverlight/Moonlight.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
Those are just the crashes in the latest version, that was released a few days ago. Most people don't update immediately, I suppose.
What are you people doing that causes Firefox to have such horrible stability problems? I leave Firefox open for literally days at a time, with anywhere between 10-25 tabs open, and I have no stability problems.
Ditto, but with often several hundred tabs open. Firefox seems pretty stable for me, but it does chew up the memory. I've found Chromium to be much leaner in memory on a per-tab basis than firefox (but that's kinda moot since there's no vertical tree-style tab option in linux Chromium and I therefore can't use Chromium with several hundred tabs open).
Mind you, I use noscript on firefox to make sure some of the viler and more odious objects on the internet don't affect me. Maybe Firefox without noscript is less stable?
Iron really doesn't provide any advantage over Chrome with regard to privacy.
Finally, somebody who not just posts FUD but actually investigates. After reading parent's article though, I get the feeling that Iron does actually do exactly what it claims to do: improve the user's privacy by changing default settings that 99% of Chrome users never even heard about, let alone change them to appropriate values. Specifically the changes mentioned are:
privacy related:
- disables the Google suggestion service (which informs Google about what you're typing into the search bar before you trigger the search)
- disables a service called GoogleURLTracker (which informs Google about your location, so it can "localise" you)
- Chromium's built-in statistics recording and reporting functionality is shut off
- the Client ID of the browser is wiped out
- disables Google's alternate error pages (that invokes another Google service, that isn't really required for web browsing)
- disables a web resource service used to fetch new help tips for Chromium (another service that "phones home" is disabled)
other:
- changes the Chromium version number from 5.0.306 to 4.0.280 (Iron version number)
- number of thumbnails in the New Tab page is increased from 8 to 12
- number of days of history used to compile that data is increased from 90 to 180
- Chromium tips that are shown on the New Tab page to help users learn how to use Chromium are disabled
- dialog that Chromium shows new users when it is first run is disabled
To recap, this article headlines "Is Iron a Scam? Yes" actually lists Iron's diffs from the Chromium project (which btw is only the codebase for Chrome, which itself is not open source, thus we have no way to ascertain what the Chrome browser is actually doing in the background). These diffs contains modifications that ensure that most of the default behaviours of Chromium that "phone home" are disabled and can not be enabled through the options menu.
So no matter what kind of douchebags the developer(s) may be, they are actually delivering on what they promise - a browser that disables phoning home features. Again: these features can be disabled through Chromium's options menu, but most people won't because they don't know about them.
Furthermore they are doing this while also releasing their source code for everyone to see (and compile) so we not only see what changes they make to the privacy settings, but can also make sure they are not adding questionable features themselves. In any case, if you wanted to fork your own personalised "privacy enabled" browser from the Chromium project it looks as if forking from the Iron source will save you some work.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
I answered this questions a few days ago in a different thread, but again: 1st part: _Most_ of the preferences Iron changes can be disabled in _Chromium_ . Keywords: Most, Chromium. How many non-nerds are using Chromium? Is Chromium easily obtainable for non-nerds? Are _all_ the preferences Iron changes easily disabled in Chromium? Are _all_ the preferences easily disabled in _Chrome_? Regarding the delayed schedule... You are comparing oranges and nectarines, let's say. Iron is based on stable Chromium releases, like Chrome and ChromePlus. Iron is on the Chrome and ChromePlus league, not on the Chromium league. It's based on Chromium because it has to, just like ChromePlus. 2nd part: Soooooo... PaleMoon, CometBird, ChromePlus, etc. are also pretentious and preying on different fears people have regarding the original browsers they are derived from? They don't change much code, but they change the name. They deserve hate as well, I guess. Yes, Iron changes only a few lines. So what? The guy pulled a "great" ROI with almost no effort. He provides a Chrome alternative that works as advertised, and that massively pisses-off 4 slashdotters. It's always the same story "he only changed a few lines in Chromium". Duh! That's the whole premise of Iron. Perhaps there would be less noise if he called it Chromium+ or Chromium For The Masses.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
I've trimmed my browsing down to keep within 2-3 windows and 10-15 tabs most of the time, and I *still* have to restart daily to reset memory once it gets up to 600-700 MB of RAM. Once it gets to that point, everything in the browser starts to lag (menus, select boxes on web pages, scrolling, tab switching, etc). It commonly takes half a second to respond to mouse wheel scrolls. Happening once might not seem such a big deal, but happening *every single time* you try to scroll a page? Beyond frustrating.
It's both possible and practical to centrally configure Firefox in a very extensive fashion through Group Policies (or even brute force script-based replication of the various Firefox prefs config files), making simplified network-wide rollout and management a real option in medium and large environments. This is not possible with Chrome or Chromium, and doesn't look like it will be any time in the near future. Also, Adblock with element hiding, combined with Flashblock on terminal server setups is a major selling point for smaller organizations (where a proxy setup to do the same thing may not be in the cards cost-wise).
The ability to add multiple rows of tabs in Firefox is a major usability advantage over Chrome for power users. The new UI looks like it may remove this ability (which is, granted, only conferred through plugins in current Firefox builds, but at least it's possible.) Don't tell me about "Firefox is bloated derp" so can't handle too many tabs anyway, I don't know what the hell people are doing with their browsers that makes their FireFox eat up these astronomical memory amounts of 800-1000mb I keep hearing about. Put down the crack^H^H^H^H^HFarmVille pipe and get a life, perhaps? Although some people are disorganized idiots who seem to think tabs are bookmarks and have 100 of them open, I have seen many cases where regular users run 20-40 tabs in FireFox 3.6, under Windows XP, and never see memory usage for the process exceed 350-400mb at *worst*, with ~200-250mb about average. There's a FUDge factory out there somewhere working 3 shifts 7 days a week pumping out a lot of utterly unwarranted bad press for FireFox.
Practically zero issues (other than the unavoidable ActiveX conflicts that are resolved using an IETab of some sort, Chrome does no better here), even with multiple plugins running, lots of in-tab PDF manipulation, and users who are not especially computer savvy and thus do not know what is safe or unsafe to do to a browser. None of this "FireFox is unstable" horseshit. Not once in the past 6 months have I ever had to kill a FireFox instance because it froze or crashed uncontrollably (users don't have access to task manager) Seriously, people are doing something blatantly wrong or just making this crap up because of one bad FireFox experience they had 2 or 3 years ago. Or maybe FireFox just runs like crap on Linux? Oh, the delicious irony.
oh, never mind.
just look for Frontmotion Firefox Community edition.
MSI installer with update overlays? Check.
ADMs pre-built to create GPOs that control almost everything in prefs.js? Check.
Packaging tool to push pre-installed and configured prefs and addons for both? Check (ok, last one costs $200/year but is unlimited in # of seats. Totally worth the cost for updating an organization with more than 10-15 PCs).
Why are they calling it 4.0 and not 3.7 as it should be? Don't give in to publicity stuns Mozilla, you're better than that.
How the fuck is this flamebait? Firefox DOES have a memory leak and has had one for a very long time. I have been able to reproduce it on every PC I've used it on.
At first it was just the Firefox devs who were living in denial. Now people are having their posts marked as flamebait for bringing up a legitimate topic. Just fuck right off. I'm more happy than ever that I dumped Firefox years ago, if not for the memory leak then for the association to its developers and zealots.
Shouldn't you be on digg?
I've given instructions every single time, it's just that thick headed zealots like you never want them.
Open Firefox and just let it run for a few weeks. You don't even have to do anything else. Watch as its memory usage rises up to gigabyte levels.
People regularly run Firefox for weeks and they report that that doesn't happen. Try setting up some sort of automated test that demonstrates Firefox using more memory than other browsers when they run the test. The funny thing is that when people run such tests, they seem to find that Firefox uses less memory than other browsers.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Try that with chrome,ie8,safari,... please and let us know if your windows is crashing. Because chrome will open up a seperate sub-process for each task resulting in much more overhead for windows. And ie8, well i don't have to draw a picture of it.
I am a heavy tab user too. Opera handles 100s of tabs better than firefox IMHO. The most I had in Opera was 412.
In Firefox I tend to hover between 80-150
When you have Tree Style Tabs, having hundreds of tabs is easier than you think to manage.
It means I multitask a lot which may be ineffective. I just dislike abandoning a resource or website I was reading to quickly do something else.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Debian adds their own patches to make software more stable. Doesn't really count.
No, but many people do want proper adblock plus. I think they'll be a major shift to Chrome as soon as it gets decent adblocking.
Sorry, I have to use other browsers and visually check their memory consumption,
as i am a web developer and use the web to power my apps....
no go for you, no cigar, do not pass go and collect 200$
The patches in Iceweasel are:
So, some is branding, other little fixes, not really about performance, and the rest are changes to the Makefile. There's no "fix all crashes" patch in any way.
Dilbert RSS feed
"... the tab metaphor is meant for *maybe* dozens of tabs, tops." The master has spoken?
Interesting, I hadn't heard of using soda-cans as a heat-sink - though obviously, I can see why that would work.
:-D
Only thing is, I don't keep soda-cans. Guess beer will do...
I care, reloads of 100+ tabs at once takes ages. And I wasn't complaining about stability, I was complimenting Firefox on surviving my massively excessive workload of long periods.
That's pretty much how I work too. If I'm googling the answer to something, I'll tab open a good number of results from several pages of google search results, THEN go through them and prune out and irrelevant ones and start reading the useful ones. If I find what I'm looking for right away, I lose maybe two seconds in hitting ctrl+w a few times to close the remaining tabs. If it takes me 5 different dispersed pages to find the information I need, I've saved a massive quantity of time over forward&backward-ing between each result and the google search page. And have the flexibility to use multiple search points, and to branch out searching into sites and forums.
I'll be sticking with FireFox not only for it's web development addons, but because, of all things, Chrome has no addon (let alone inbuilt) support for Google Bookmarks (just a standard bookmarking hack which doesn't give even close to the same functionality), which continues to baffle me. And as I use many different computers all over the place (home, work, mobile), having my bookmarks go with me is essential.
When I can get my google bookmarks working properly in Chrome, I'll use it by default, and switch to FireFox for web development. Until then, I only use chrome if I want to quickly go to youtube to watch a video, or something.
There's also dozens of issues I have with little UI things like how Chrome highlights the current tab, etc, which are no doubt personal preferences of mine.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
Quote: "I've been using Firefox for a really long time, and the only instabilities I've ever witnessed were caused by Flash. Aside from that, I honestly have no remembrance in my head of Firefox crashing."
Paraphrase: I knew someone who smoked a lot who got cancer. Cancer has not been a problem for me, so I don't think cancer is a problem.
Gmail is an enormous memory hog, particularly if you leave it open for a long period of time. Every browser in that scenario will show growing memory use.
Even more ridiculous when you remember that he was only eating three meals a day, not 10 burgers.
Doesn't really matter if the last tab is Gmail, Slashdot, or just about:blank :P
Not every link, but certainly any link which "branches" from the current page workflow if you will. For example, when reading a Slashdot comment page, I would open a comment tree in a new tab, or a reply to comment in a new tab rather than overwriting the main discussion thread(which I'm still reading).
When are you "done" with a tab? Certainly I will close down some if it's obvious I'm finished with them, but sometimes I either forget or just leave them by. And going through a tab list to see what's still being used and what isn't would be a pretty laborious process (usually I either "close all other tabs" or restart the session when things get too stale.) Keep in mind that the Firefox session may be running for days or even weeks, so things can accumulate, and while knowning when to open tabs is a clear task, knowing when to close them is not so straightforward.
Compare this problem to a filesystem with many open files. If a program has opened many files, and hasn't used them in a while, how do you know if they should be closed?
May the Maths Be with you!
Perhaps I wasn't clear - I'd be a lot more willing to accept that this isn't what tabs are for, if one of you "you'll never need more than a few dozen tabs" types could tell me what tabs was supposed to be used for :) (In the stack-based browsing style, they organize themselves, and don't need to be found individually. Hundreds aren't kept open for very long, just 15-20 minutes or so to winnow out the dead wood.)
Hmm, maybe the two opposing camps aren't really that opposed after all, and we're merely talking at cross purposes here - your "dozens, tops" is pretty close to the 100-200 I typically run up during the course of a session, and also pretty close to the 10-20 contenders that I end up with after the winnowing process. My main browser window typically has a set of 5-10 tabs at any one time (Slashdot, a few blogs I read on a daily basis, stock quotes, etc), plus whatever I'm currently researching.
Using beer as a heat-sink sounds like alcohol abuse.... (submitted as AC since I'm TDY