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Firefox 4's JavaScript Now Faster Than Chrome's
An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 4's JavaScript engine is now faster than V8 (used in Chrome) and Nitro (used in Safari) in the SunSpider benchmark on x86. On Mozilla's test system Nitro completes the benchmark in 369.7 milliseconds, V8 in 356.5 milliseconds, and Firefox 4's TraceMonkey and JaegerMonkey combination in 350.3 milliseconds. Conceivably Tech has a brief rundown of some benchmark figures from their test system obtained with the latest JS preview build of Firefox 4: 'Our AMD Phenom X6-based Dell XPS 7100 PC completed the Sunspider test with the latest Firefox JS (4.0 b8-pre) build in 478.6 ms this morning, while Chrome 8.0.560.0 clocked in at 589.8 ms.' On x86-64 Nitro still has the lead over V8 and TraceMonkey+JaegerMonkey in the SunSpider benchmark."
FF4 crashes when I try to open Gmail since the change. This makes it slower for opening my mail.
1. connect to gmail with FF4
2. FF4 crashes.
3. Open chrome and go to gmail
4. ??? (train monkeys to joust)
5. Profit
I'll be able to do one more mouse click every three weeks or so.
No sig today...
Cue browser fanboy hooliganism....
Why do I have a feeling that Slashcode's terrible AJAX interface is going to get even worse in the near future?
This is quite possibly the lamest e-peen measuring contest ever.
Well, if it sucks, maybe you should implement a vacuum cleaner with it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You don't implement web applications in the browser, they are implemented in the server.
If you write valid HTML5 and the browser does not accept it, file a bug.
Is that simple enough?
Its great Firefox are working on certain areas of speed but they seem to always do it in the wrong areas or more to the point that their browser is built on top of a slow memory leaking turd. I run a computer with a E2200 on win7 at work. Firefox is sluggish, I've even tried the latest beta and its still slow. Chrome is very fast somehow and so none of these tests are that relevant to me. I haven't liked Firefox since version 2.
At this point it's really a pissing match since the differences between each are very little speed wise.
I am sure this will set off a whole series of arguments over benchmarks, tuning, fairness, etc. But from this article I will just take this: I don't care which one is fastest to the few dozen milliseconds, they are probably all in the same "class" now. Everybody wins. (I can sorta understand not including IE, but wonder why they didn't include Opera?)
Now that Javascript is so much faster, perhaps the browsers can focus on giving some type of automated/intelligent control over when it is used and how so older machines won't come to a CRAWL because of all the cutesy animation and junk spread over most big sites now. (And no, NoScript doesn't cut it- too complicated for most users, not automatic, too easy to break Javascript that is actually needed, etc). Suppress time-delayed actions, disable tight loops, throw artificial delays in loops under user control, visually tag elements to manually "play" on-demand only or stop after X seconds. I know, keep dreaming.
I'm so glad I'm not having to run all web servers at my home. Sure, you load your application on the server, but JavaSCRIPT runs on a browser. This is not server based JAVA but browser based JS. I need it to run faster because I have an application that very much needs JS to run faster on browsers. Why? Because my target audience is the world and not just the US. This means that I want to load applications on the users computer that they can run partially locally. We need this faster, computers faster, and Internet faster everywhere to make applications better for the user.
...is NoScript. They have brought my Java script load times down to 0.00 seconds. Thanks, NoScript.
oh wait, maybe the tests are still running.
... who really cares? Why should this twitch anyone's eyebrow, nevermind be deemed newsworthy? It may have been amusing when they first started, but now?
Look, no SIG!
Seeing that Firefox on a few weeks ago was starting to lag pretty severely behind Chrome, I applaud and thank the Firefox team for their hard work. This is also a boon for their technique, the so-called "shotgunning" method of pushing through compilation the old way if it will complete faster than the optimizations. I had become afraid I might have to move to Chrome, looks like that won't be necessary.
.Net, or whichever other poison you want, but Javascript is free of ownership and frankly a damn good language when written properly.
As a developer I completely understand the dislike of the "everything in a browser" attitude, but we need to look beyond that. The next version of ECMAScript will give us the security we've been wanting, and this round of browsers will give us the speed we need. Enabling universal, secure process level interaction between machines is the goal. You can think of it as widgets,
Now give me an 100% on the Acid3 test please, that way I'll have multiple tools to leverage against my boss next time he asks me to make a web app IE6 compatible.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
I've been trying the alphas and betas, but they still haven't managed to fix the numerous memory leaks that have plagued Firefox for so long now.
It's no longer worth opening bug reports, since the community just doesn't want to admit there's a problem in the first place. They'll blame the memory leaks on third-party extensions or plugins, even when these memory leaks arise using a pristine installation without either. Or they'll say it's just a problem with the user's system, even when it happens under many different versions of Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, running on all sorts of hardware, under many different configurations. Clearly, it's a problem with Firefox itself.
Somehow, all of the other browser developers manage to put out browsers that don't leak huge amounts of memory after relatively short browsing sessions. Opera, Chrome, Safari, and even recent releases of IE don't go consuming gigabytes of memory, even after leaving them open for months at a time. Firefox will exceed that in less than an hour.
The question is: are all current browser implementations compatible to each other ?
No. No they aren't. Not all browsers support the same DOM properties. Some have different names for the same data and other just don't support some items. It's a mess to program for every JS implementation.
Tell me, mr anderson, what good is javascript performance if you are unable to use multiple cores?
I wish someone would get on this and make firefox work with multiple cores better. As it is I use the "|" character in my home page settings to open about 20 tabs-- forums, review sites, slashdot, economics blogs, etc....and firefox slows to a grinding halt for about the 15 seconds (just timed it) it takes to render all those pages.
Chrome does it in about 4 seconds and pegs all 4 of my cores to 100%.
Please Mozilla, I know this would require a serious redesign, but it's seriously needed. Hitching while scrolling up/down because a tab is loading in the background (I make use of middle click to open tabs in the background extensively) is very annoying.
Benchmark performance?
Who cares! Real world usage or nothing!
I really don't see the point in a posting like this. Its all
My _______ (1) is _______ (2) than yours
with typical choices for (1):
- car
- wife / husband / significant other
- d*ck
- browser
- javascript
- OS
and choices for (2) like:
- faster
- harder
- more expensive
- longer
- more open
- prettier
Now that we have covered all these discussions, can we move on please?
CU, Martin
Really, all this focus on faster Javascript puzzles me. JS, used correctly, should be a thin layer of glue, representing only a fraction of the total run time for a browser. The only real use I could begin to see would be if they could apply the same speed-ups to the Actionscript engine within Flash to improve the decoding of Hulu's encryption system - but since all the client sees is the bytecoded form of the decryption, not the AS source, and since this speedup is in the JS in the browser rather than the AS of Flash, I have to ask, "what good is making JS run faster?"
The biggest "slowdowns" I see with JS are mostly due to poorly written JS doing busy loops waiting for "stuff" to happen, rather than doing completion routines (as in the whole asynchronous part of A JAX?). No speed ups in the engine will make a busy loop run faster or take less CPU time. If we could break programmers of the busy loop habit, perhaps by making JS be truly multithreaded, and providing proper blocking APIs (semaphores, message queues, etc.) it might make a difference.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Here's why you never write games purely in javascript
1. Cheating = Your source code is completely exposed (and more so than flash.) So any new game you put up is going to be "finished" in 30 seconds with all achievements and a 2 trillion point score.
2. Multiplayer griefing = If all the game's logic is in javascript, then it's a simple matter of changing things so you have an advantage.
3. Malware = Developers are not all the same, when an entire motive of a game is to garner ad revenue, then the game is going to be riddled with holes that either allow the player to rig the "ad" viewing experience,or remove it entirely, just like back in the day of 'ad tool bars' and bots.
As someone who has repeatedly asked for a demonstration of Firefox's supposed memory leaks over the past several years, and has yet to be able to reproduce any of the claimed results, I can say for sure that reports of Firefox memory leaks are absolutely trolls. If you disagree, explain how I could see one of these problems. If I can reproduce it, I will certainly admit there is a problem. Why should one admit to a problem that one cannot perceive? Why would you accuse others of pretending the problems don't exist, when the problems cannot be seen?
Quake II was released in 1997. That's 13 years ago. At the time of its release, Intel's top-end CPU was the Pentium II running at 233 MHz, and even that had only just been released. Most Quake II players were still using Pentium or high-end 486 systems.
Today, a decade and a half later, we have cell phones that are many hundreds of times faster than those Pentium and Pentium II systems, and desktop systems that are thousands or tens of thousands of times more powerful. Yet with all that raw processing power, JavaScript still barely allows us to do what we could do way back then.
I don't know if you've tried it yet, but that version of Quake II that you've linked to runs quite poorly on very modern hardware when using Chrome (which has the best JavaScript implementation around).
If JavaScript doesn't let us easily do what we could do before, we'll never be able to get further ahead.
You display the kind of attitude that makes the Firefox community look like a bunch of infants. Just because you personally can't reproduce a problem that many, many people are reporting, it "must not exist and the reporters are trolls."
It's very easy to reproduce these problems:
1. Download the Firefox installer for your platform from mozilla.org. This could be the latest 3.6 release, or the latest 4.0 beta.
2. Install it. Make sure you do not install any sort of plugins or extensions. We want a clean, default Firefox installation.
3. Browse the web for 30 minutes. Visit a variety of sites, including Slashdot, Facebook, and some of the popular news sites.
4. Use top or the Task Manager or whatever your system offers to see the memory usage of the Firefox-related processes. Notice that they'll be in the gigabytes.
When faced with such a problem, most mature open source projects wouldn't go attacking the problem reporters. They'd accept the reports, and even if the developers themselves had trouble reproducing the issue at hand, at least they'd treat the problems as real and not attack the reporters.
It's not a memory leak problem. This is pretty obvious when, after weeks of continuous use, Firefox's memory usage remains more or less constant.
However, Firefox does have a memory fragmentation problem. After continuous use, the program will become noticeably slower on certain tasks which it previously had no issues with. This is particularly the case if you're visiting more intensive webpages. Often you're better just restarting it after the first 100 or so tabs.
May the Maths Be with you!
As I've said, I've tried this. Firefox's memory use tops 200 MB after two weeks. Other browsers go over 200 MB in a few days. I'm not attacking you, just stating for the record that I cannot see a problem. Perhaps on your computer that problem exists. Do not assume that every other Firefox user in the world sees the same problem. I do not. If you don't believe me, look at any number of memory tests that show Firefox using less memory than other browsers: 1 2 3 4, and many more!
It's very easy to reproduce these problems: 1. Download the Firefox installer for your platform from mozilla.org. This could be the latest 3.6 release, or the latest 4.0 beta. 2. Install it. Make sure you do not install any sort of plugins or extensions. We want a clean, default Firefox installation. 3. Browse the web for 30 minutes. Visit a variety of sites, including Slashdot, Facebook, and some of the popular news sites.
I've done that. Several times over the years. But:
4. Use top or the Task Manager or whatever your system offers to see the memory usage of the Firefox-related processes. Notice that they'll be in the gigabytes.
didn't happen. Only time was with FF4 b5/b6 memory leak because of a bug in their new audio API. Chrome OTOH happily ocupies several hundred MB RAM after just 3-4 hours of usage.
Sorry to burst your bubble but I'm right now on a Dimension 8250 P4 2.53 w/ 512MB RAM w/ Ubuntu 10.10 Openbox. 15 tabs open in FF 3.6.11 and top shows 250MB total used out of 512MB. With about 100-150 for OS + Services and desktop manager it's actually pretty snappy. I do remember the days where after a few tabs opening and closing would cap me off at 800MB and be thrashing but now I really don't see it. You just can't tell someone the program is taking too much memory and not tell them what pages you have loaded and other specifics, there is no way I can just say it's using too much memory to a developer and he/she will be able to go through hundreds of thousands lines of code and figure out what went wrong, I'm sorry it just doesn't work like that. Bitch all you want but until your willing to meet half way I don't know what to tell you.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Admittedly, I haven't followed your instructions exactly. I have Firefox 3.6.11 from the Ubuntu repositories for 10.10, rather than what one would retrieve from mozilla.org. Also, I have several add-ons active, though only Adblock Plus would potentially filter out things that might add to memory leakage--and wouldn't more plugins use more RAM? ps output shows that it's been running for an hour I have twelve tabs open, including Facebook, Yahoo! mail, Instapundit and New World Notes, both of which tend to have lots of embedded flash videos, Slashdot of course, flickr, and other stray web pages. Ubuntu System Monitor shows firefox-bin using 348.3 MB and plugin-container using 218.3, total well under a gigabyte.
I know, I know, it's damn near impossible to believe, but the Firefox developers voluntarily chose to write a huge portion of Firefox in JavaScript and XML (XUL). The rendering engine and network stack are written in C++, but just about everything else is implemented using JavaScript and XUL, including all of the UI.
This is why JavaScript performance is so important to Firefox. While other browsers didn't make the same mistake, and wrote the bulk of the browsers in a real language like C++, the Firefox developers chose what is probably the stupidest architecture possible. A slow JavaScript implementation means their entire browser is slow, rather than just any web pages that might use JavaScript in some way.
I really was (am) trying to fully embrace Chrome. But everyday, I find reason (most not directly Google's fault) not to fully switch. Firefox 4 is becoming everything I was looking for in a browser....speed, support, compatibility. There are certain things linked to my browser that just make some tasks easier, and I am finding that not very many sites that offer Firefox extensions to their products/services are simply not interested in porting the extension to Chrome. I find this disheartening...but changing to a new service is more work than I wish to do, especially multiple times over. So I keep two browsers installed at all times to ensure I can get done what I need to do without slowing down on senseless lack of support from some company's.
Keywords for the NSA overthrow oppressive regime true believers marathon Manhatten the financial district blueprints I
Memory fragmentation will cause a program to use more memory, not cause it to slow down. Since Firefox moved to jealloc in 2008, memory fragmentation in Firefox is low. As with memory leaks, these problems were fixed years ago, but users still complain that the problems are being ignored and not fixed.
Fragmentation can certainly cause a program to slow down. If memory is fragmented significantly, you're going to see a lot more page faults as memory is accessed. With an OS like Windows that's aggressive in moving memory out to disk things will certainly slow down.
I have had firefox running for over a week now. I've visited numerous sites, loads of tabs of Slashdot, had previously many open tabs on furaffunity and various sites but eventually closed them. There is one window with a god awful amount of tabs, infact all the monster.co.uk's jobs for Glasgow and that has been sitting there since Monday. So, you would think this would be a good candidate to observe you problem. Now, my system as a god awful amount of memory too, yet.. What is Firefox using?
According to http://dl.dropbox.com/u/58565/firefox-memory.jpg It's just over 300MB and I was expecting far more with the amount of tabs I have open. I doubt foxyproxy or firefox sync (the only addons I have) magically made the "memory leak" go away.
Can you explain why I am not seeing this issue please?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
im using a 4 beta i downloaded last week. i dont have any extensions installed but i did install flash so i can use youtube. ive had my browser open since i installed it and youre right its using 5838 MB of ram says the win vista taskmgr. lol i didnt realize it was so bad! ive got 12 gb ram so its not like a huge problem but thats still not very good at all.
Memory fragmentation will not directly cause a program to slow down. If there is bad memory fragmentation, it could possibly cause a program to consume all RAM, which would in turn increase the number of page faults, causing a slowdown. But in that case users will complain about memory use and hard disk activity, not a slowdown.
I think they forget that page caching is not a leak.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
You're missing the point; simply because you, me, or the majority experience no memory leak issues does not mean they don't exist. Computers differ enough that it's impossible to say that what works on one system will work on another with a different operating system, different system settings, different software installed, or even different hardware. I'll concede that it's impossible to replicate every possible user installation, but it's likely that the people who report the problem have something in common, even if it's not readily apparent; being hostile toward them for reporting it is arrogant and counterproductive.
Jesus loves me, he loves me a bunch, because he always puts Jiffy in my lunch.
Does Firefox support the new File API yet? The same as Chrome and Safari, not the older one which was Firefox-only.
Call it what you want, all I know is that Firefox continuously consumes more and more memory on every system I've used it on, without ever freeing any. It also gets progressively slower as the day goes on until it is unusable and must be restarted.
This is precisely the reason I ditched Firefox and started using a browser that I can leave up for weeks or months at a time without any problems.
I didn't say that the memory leaks don't exist. My point is there's no point complaining about them if no one can see them. If no one can see them, no one can fix them. How is pointing that out being hostile? Claiming that every Firefox user suffers from horrible memory leaks is hostile, because anyone can see that it isn't true. Most Firefox users are happy with low memory usage, as you can see from the posts below.
The bottom line is that anyone who wants a memory problem in Firefox fixed simply needs to post a description of the problem so that others can see it. But instead of that, all we get are posts about Firefox users being arrogant and counterproductive. How is that supposed to help?
I'm tired of looking at benchmark figures. I want blog articles on how these JIT engines work (differently) and WHY one or anther is faster. Or at least why the FF engine is faster than it used to be.
FF4 (beta) also breaks half my plug-ins, including Greasemonkey. No thanks.
Easy. I can demonstrate this on basically any PC.
Download and install Firefox. Open up some "normal" pages, ie. Slashdot, Youtube, Amazon and just leave it running. After a day or two, Firefox will have consumed tons of memory and be too slow to use. When I do the same (actually worse, I usually have 30+ tabs open at any given time) with Chrome or Opera, I've run them for MONTHS without even a sign of incident.
The only troll here, is you.
No sign of Presto (Opera's js engine) ... or IE (just to be complete).
What we really need are DOM-Bindings for Bytecode. So you can use every language you want that is capable of compiling to bytecode and send it to a browser. This would make it easier for the developer and bytecode is easier and faster for the browser to execute.
JavaScript should become a legacy system since I think we are slowly at the point that JS-parsing and executing can no longer be optimized. We're getting there so that you can only throw hardware at the "problem".
I think Firefox uses more memory if it thinks your computer has a lot of memory, and vice versa if your computer has little memory. That's actually a good thing.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
I can see them just fine. I've had my firefox consuming over 2GB of ram before, with the only tab open being blank at the time. I'm now in the habit of restarting my firefox many times per day, so I can't say for sure if it's still currently a problem or not, but I typically "remember" to kill firefox whenever my work machine starts to get slow out of habit. My home machine rarely cares because it's got 12GB of ram, and even 2GB is really nothing to it.
I love competition! I don't have to bother with being called a troll for reporting a problem, I can just switch to a better browser like Chrome! I do miss my tree-style tabs, though.
FF4's JS is faster? That's nice. Maybe that'll help to make up for the abysmal amount of time it takes to even LAUNCH on my system.
Your brain is not a computer.
Go to Google image search and type in firefox memory leak. You'll find a lot of screenshots that disagree with yours.
Memory fragmentation can cause it to slow down because it takes more overhead to find free space for more allocations.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
What OS, version, and hardware are you using?
(Screenshots won't disagree with each other.)
What could a screenshot prove to me that using Firefox will not? I have never experienced any sort of memory leakage problems using Firefox 3 and up - and in fact, many reviews have shown that Firefox (3 and up) release memory more aggressively than many of its competitors.
Anyhow, it's still very possible to create an image where Firefox uses gigabytes of RAM - simply by just opening huge amount of content - if you have the RAM, Firefox will use it. In similar situations, browsers using multi-process arch (e.g. Chrome) would probably use even more memory, if possible.
Then file a bug report in Bugzilla and problem can be fixed. But surely if this is a problem, there's already a report and it has lots of votes. Where is it?
I, too, saw the speed of Firefox 4 in a pretty simple, math-only benchmark that rotated a 3D object. Run it for yourself and/or see the gathered statistics (bottom of the page). Here is the Reddit discussion where many people run it and confirmed Firefox 4 supremacy.
Will it also immediately free that RAM if another program needs it? A browser should always be conservative on RAM usage, even if it seems to have plenty available.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's very easy to reproduce these problems:
1. Download the Firefox installer for your platform from mozilla.org. This could be the latest 3.6 release, or the latest 4.0 beta.
Check for 3.6. (Well, I had it installed already, but that's how I got it.)
2. Install it. Make sure you do not install any sort of plugins or extensions. We want a clean, default Firefox installation
Check (kind of). I have several plugins installed (including Flash and Java) but it's unlikely they would reduce the amount of memory Firefox uses.
3. Browse the web for 30 minutes. Visit a variety of sites, including Slashdot, Facebook, and some of the popular news sites.
Check. I've been browsing for a couple of hours now (with breaks in between, but not closing the browser windows) and I have 9 tabs open spread across 2 browser windows.
4. Use top or the Task Manager or whatever your system offers to see the memory usage of the Firefox-related processes. Notice that they'll be in the gigabytes.
Unfortunately, try as I might, I could not reproduce this. Firefox process seems to be using (as of now) 90MB of memory (out of 4 GB), with the plugin-container using some 30-odd MB for a YouTube video. That would be almost one gigaBIT but not even an eight of a gigabyte, so I can hardly say the memory usage is in the gigabytes.
When faced with such a problem, most mature open source projects wouldn't go attacking the problem reporters. They'd accept the reports, and even if the developers themselves had trouble reproducing the issue at hand, at least they'd treat the problems as real and not attack the reporters.
Since the release of Firefox 3, mostly only anonymous posts have claimed to have issue with memory leaks in Firefox. This is no exception.
Are you sure there is a problem? I, for one, can't see one.
Home: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1, EVga X58 3X SLI Motherboard, Intel 930 CPU, 12GB of kingston DDR3 Hyper-X, PNY NVidia 8800Gtx (Replaced a dead NVidia 295GTX temporarily - waiting for the NVidia 580 to come out), Intel 80GB Gen 2 SSD Boot Drive (74GB S:), Corsair H50 Water CPU cooler, 2 Seagate 1TB 7200.12 drives (954GB Raid-0 (683GB C:, 247GB P:), and 477 GB Raid-1 (465GB U:)), and 2 Seagate 320GB 7200.10 drives (305GB Raid-1 (Backup)), 8GB OCZ RallyX Thumbdrive (7.47GB R:) in a cooler master HAF-X case.
Office: HP Machine running Windows XP SP3, E6600 CPU (or similar), 160GB Seagate 7200.10 Drive (160GB C:), integrated video (Intel chipset).
Does that help?
Sorry, the Office machine has 4Gb of RAM (3.4GB useable) and is running 32-bit version of XP.
Comparing Chrome 8.0.552.11 dev to Firefox 4.0b6 on Sun Spider.
Chrome: 335.6ms +/- 2.8%
Firefox: 543.6ms +/- 2.4%
System: AMD Phenom II 965 w/ 4GB RAM on Win7 Ultimate.
My God! It's full of eval()'s.
No it isn't. You rarely run Firefox as the only program, and if Firefox eats RAM because it's "available" then other programs will have less memory available. A web browser is a typical "background application" (i.e. you keep it open while working with other programs) and therefore should use as little memory as reasonably possible. The attitude of "the memory is available, so I can use it" was appropriate in DOS, but it's generally not appropriate on a multitasking OS.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
When my computer "only" has 4 GB of RAM, and I've disabled the swap file for performance reasons, yet Firefox stills feels it's necessary to use 3.75 GB of RAM for its "page caching", something is wrong. The remaining memory is barely enough for me to run Windows, never mind other Mozilla bloatware like Thunderbird.
And you're a stupid dick. How do you expect devs to fix a problem they *can't replicate*? Magic?
I've never got 2GB before, but once, I had 275 tabs open, with 1.5GB of memory usage, and I didn't even care because my computer was running as smooth as when it only has 8 tabs open.
It doesn't make any sense at all to boast about speed while the software is still in Beta. If you don't need to be correct, you could complete the javascript benchmark in 1ms by just executing a no-op for each action. Once Firefox 4 has demonstrated the ability to execute all the javascript correctly, then I'll be interested in the benchmark scores.
To bad they forgot to test the newest Opera , which smokes all three of these browsers by almost 100 ms on my machine in the SunSpider tests.
You are entitled to that opinion, but many people think otherwise. I want my browser to be optimized primarily for features, speed and latency, not memory usage. I can buy more RAM if I need to.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
... Because Opera lets you disable the usage of javascript ENTIRELY on sites of your choosing, and allows enabling it on sites of YOUR choosing. Best of all possible worlds and built right in natively to Opera.
But in the meantime, try BarTab, and never look back. See, just because you open 20 tabs, doesn't mean you have to download and render their content right away. In fact, i wonder why this isn't the default behavior in browsers, what is the point in wasting resources in tabs you are not seeing?
Of course you are also right about the lack of using multiple cores, but this addon makes life much easier.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Looks like old versions that don't even have the plugin wrapper, judging from the task manager process lists. I'm not really seeing it?
Anyway, you didn't answer my question.
Can you explain why I am not seeing this issue please?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Then file a bug report so the problem can be fixed. To do that, you should include a set of steps that will allow others to see what the problem is so that they'll know what to fix.
The rest of the browser is so god-damned slow when compared to Chrome, at least for me. It doesn't matter that it can execute JS on a webpage 10% faster than another browser, if loading that page alone takes 200% longer than on said other browser.
and using a Firefox without extensions is terribad.
I'm sure Opera's performance kicks the shit out of the rest of them still, anyway, too. Although the betas have been a lot more crashy than normal lately.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
wow, you don't do shit in your browsers do you? My average browser workload has Opera over 500meg commit charge, the same in Firefox is enough to get Windows to say "YOU ARE RUNNING OUT OF MEMORY PLEASE KILL FIREFOX.EXE" (64-bit system, with a 4-gig swapfile and 2gigs ram .. yeah, it's a bit light on the RAM, but i'm broke right now)
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Now open up 90-120 tabs as I usually run. :)
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Months? Now you're trolling!
Your operating system should be dealing with that, not the browser.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
These Firefox threads always amuse me, because there is a very tiny minority of people that will run Firefox for weeks at a time, without restarting it, while having 100 tabs open, and then complain about how it handles memory.
Well no shit... Ever hear of bookmarks? I can't think of any reason I'd even want to keep a browser with 100 tabs open, for weeks at a time. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong.
Just look at the massive improvements to Firefox and IE since Chrome came out. Firefox was becoming bloated and slow while IE had been for years. Chrome has benefitted all internet users, whether they use it or a competing browser. I still use Safari because I'm a Mac whore, but Chrome is the only browser I've used that's noticeably faster. It's a fine example of why competition is necessary for products to improve. And not just competition between two or three entities, but from several.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
"Want to make you site fast? You don't need Ajax, Flash, or any other "Hype du Jour". Toss it all out, stick with plain old HTML" - by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 24, @09:33AM (#34003488)
Agreed, 110%: Most sites really do NOT require FLASH, or JavaScript (or JAVA) to run and allow the user to see the content he came to see/learn from etc. ...
---
"Wham, your site is now an order of magnitude faster." - by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 24, @09:33AM (#34003488)
Truckloads faster, especially when you are NOT wasting time &/or your bandwidth YOU PAY FOR OUT OF YOUR OWN POCKET on downloading & running adbanners (or other scripted content, that may or MAY NOT harbor malicious script within it).
1 OTHER "USEFUL TRICK" is moving your webbrowser cache content to another disk, just like moving your operating system's Pagefile.sys (Windows) OR swap partition (linux) to another diskdrive (preferably one that's not used by your OS &/or Programs) so you unburden your OS &/or Programs housing disk to load programs instead of handling webbrowser caching!
I do this in Opera for example, via the settings in Opera's operaprefs.ini, explained here http://www.opera.com/support/mastering/sysadmin/#user-file preferences file:
I use these sections to do this from that file:
Linux
[User Prefs]
CACHE DISK=/media/SWAPPAGE/TEMP/
Cache Directory1=/media/SWAPPAGE/TEMP/
Cache Directory2=/media/SWAPPAGE/TEMP/
Cache Directory3=/media/SWAPPAGE/TEMP/
Cache Directory4=/media/SWAPPAGE/TEMP/
[Cache]
exactly the same settings as above...
[Disk Cache]
once more, the exact same settings as above...
Windows
[User Prefs]
CACHE DISK=J
Cache Directory1=J:\Temp
Cache Directory2=J:\Temp
Cache Directory3=J:\Temp
Cache Directory4=J:\Temp
[Cache]
same settings as above...
[Disk Cache]
again, same settings as above...
(This also helps limit fragmentation too, as a final bonus, no less, by moving the browser's cache content to another diskdrive)
APK
P.S.=> Above all else, you've "hit things right on the head" with this comment of yours:
"The Web is rapidly going the way of television: once it was about content, then ads came 'to pay for the content' and now it is all ads with the absolute minimum of content. Spreading a two paragraph article over eight pages just to have more ad impressions. Six pictures that just have to be in a slide show. Ads. Profit. Bottomline." - by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 24, @09:33AM (#34003488)
Yes, you've got it down perfectly: It's really "ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS" being made for advertisers & webmasters, but the sad part is, just like with adbanners, you have to foot that bill for them by using YOUR BANDWIDTH YOU PAY FOR...
To that, I just say this:
"No, no, senor - no thank you"
I'll keep blocking those adbanners &/or popups via HOSTS files & Opera's native abilities to allow or disallow scripts on website pages of YOUR choosing (leaving scripting on where you may need it on various sites, such as ecommerce related ones for example).
That's so I get all the speed I paid for from my ISP, rather than downloading & running the scripted content (which has been found to have malicious code in it more than just a few times over the past 4-5 yrs. now online no less)... apk
Of course, for every "memory usage is fine" story, you have a "memory leaks!" story. For what it's worth, I don't think that I've seen Firefox consume multiple gigabytes in a while (then again, I've stopped using it much for other reasons), but I just checked my system and saw that I'd left Firefox open without running any windows/tabs. Nothing open, and yet it consumed 500MB. Not the end of the world, and I have memory to spare, but still a bit much.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Please instead of vague statements, put about:memory into the address bar and paste the contents of that into a comment here.
Been having a similar issue. No plugins. Every version of Firefox for several decades now. Linux (several distributions), OS X, Windows 2000, XP, Vista. All I hear is that it's my plugins - the ones I don't have.
Not sure it's memory related - FF appears to be sucking extraordinary amounts of memory compared to, say, Chrome - but it isn't *that* outrageous, and doesn't escalate into NOM NOM NOM all mah RAM.
But FF becomes dog arse slow and randomly unresponsive, eventually crashing completely.
Tired of http? Lets move on to gopher..
Please put about:memory into the address bar and paste the contents of that into a comment here.
The OS's job is to figure out how to handle allocated memory, only the browser knows whether or not to allocate in the first place to get best results.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
I've been surfing the web fairly continuously since I got up this morning (5 hours ago). I have stacks of plug-ins installed. I've read PDFs, watched videos, looked at Slashdot and Reddit, and wherever those other sites took me, read those too. Right now I have three tabs open, plus a PDF of a menu I am trying to choose my lunch from. My current Firefox memory usage (FF 3.6.11 on OS X 10.6.4) is 245.1 Mb. YMMV.
planet texture maps and more
I use FF heavily and support it for many users. Haven't seen memory issues since FF 3.0 (or maybe earlier).
http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/5862/81421018.png
This is after about 2 hrs of use visiting the majority of my normal bookmarks, 2 web based email accounts, and visiting some random links from IRC. I have never seen FF use a gig of ram even after being open for days. It's version 3.6.3.
You're going to have to provide a lot more specific steps than "open Firefox for 30 minutes". It's pretty stupid to blame the developers when you can't even provide reproducible steps.
Jesus guys, can't you just congratulate the Firefox devs on the great job they're doing? Just look at the rate of improvement over the past few months and give the JaegerMonkey/TraceMonkey guys kudos for a really impressive job of software engineering. Have a look at David Mandelin's recent post to get an idea of how much work and planning has gone into this project.
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.
However, Firefox does have a memory fragmentation problem.
If we're talking about the same thing, that issue was resolved a couple years ago for Firefox 3. See here.
Meanwhile, still no integer data type.
Uh, I didn't say FF should eat up RAM just because its available, it should allocate based on optimizing for the system. Think about it, you have a 512 MB system and a 8 GB system. You don't want FF eating more than half of the 512 MB system, but you shouldn't mind if FF grabs a GB or two from the 8GB set up. Scaling up does not mean eating all of the RAM.
As for being backgrounded, its up to the OS to kick FF to the curb for a while. There's a beautiful thing called Virtual Memory. FF can still have X memory, but most of it can be shipped to the disk when the system feels like it. Which it does, if you've ever noticed that opening a minimized program can lag when you're pushing the limits.
And with a modern computer with a modern OS, it's okay to be RAM greedy so long as you don't overkill on using it. If allocated memory isn't used, it (eventually) gets mapped to the disk so that it's saved, but it's not taking up RAM.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Dealing with "that"? With what?
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Well, there's your problem. MS Paint also slows my computer to a crawl if I open 900 enormous images. Don't open so many tabs. And don't hold them that way.
Not even close. And that is after about 3 hours of browsing on YouTube, Facebook, several forums and DeviantArt. Not saying there are no issues with Firefox, but those memory leaks are hard to reproduce.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
A browser should always be conservative on RAM usage, even if it seems to have plenty available.
Always? Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure I could write a web browser that used a tiny fraction of what any of the browsers use today. Performance would suck though :-).
The point I'm trying to make is that it's very much a tradeoff - using less memory often means running slower in certain circumstances. Making the "right" tradeoff is very difficult, especially with the situation of a web browser, where hardware resources, workload (ie complexity/number of sites) and expectations vary enormously :-)
Need to type accents and special characters in Windows? Use FrKeys
With 500 tabs open, I can get it to over a GB, but only 700MB are resident. But that's a lot of tabs.
But in that case users will complain about memory use and hard disk activity, not a slowdown.
Can I swap some of your users for mine? ;-)
Need to type accents and special characters in Windows? Use FrKeys
Being conservative on RAM usage doesn't mean to reduce it on any price. It means not taking any decision which increases memory usage lightly, and to err more in the direction of too little than too much memory usage. It means caring about memory usage, and not wasting much memory for minor improvements. It means specifically thinking about how memory usage can be improved, and giving that topic a priority.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Simple models of memory don't work well when applied to real computers.
May the Maths Be with you!
A cheap 2 gigabyte stick of RAM is about £30 now, at most... how hard up are you not to be able to afford a couple, or at least one of those?
I don't get the Firefox memory issue. I've been running it for about 24 hours now, and it's sitting on 140mb in Vista64 (4gb installed, about 1.5gb used total ATM). I do get other issues with Firefox, such as the unable to close (even empty) tabs bug... but memory usage is not one of the problems.
If you don't like utilities using lots of RAM, make sure your operating system isn't throwing memory about randomly... Stuff like prefetch on Windows chews your hard disk and throws everything into RAM. Some people like it because it makes applications launch about 5-10% faster on average. I don't, so I turned it off.
They must have fixed the problems I had with Firefox, then... that or I'm forced into using horrible web pages frequently, which Chrome just doesn't seem to have a problem with. I could never keep my Firefox open for more than a week until it ate up all the RAM I have--I'd go from in the 100MB used range to almost 100% of my 2GB in use, then back down to around 100MB as soon as I closed Firefox (and waited for it to clean up). That's why I stopped ever using Firefox...
The thing about you Firefox supporters is that you aren't heavy web users. You think that a few hours of casual browsing is enough to make a comparison on.
The current uptime for my browser (Opera) is almost 2 and a half months, with heavy, daily usage. Try doing that on Firefox and see how long it runs before you have to restart it.
It's not a memory leak problem. This is pretty obvious when, after weeks of continuous use, Firefox's memory usage remains more or less constant.
However, Firefox does have a memory fragmentation problem. After continuous use, the program will become noticeably slower on certain tasks which it previously had no issues with. This is particularly the case if you're visiting more intensive webpages. Often you're better just restarting it after the first 100 or so tabs.
I have the exact same problem with Chrome - slowing down on certain tasks for no apparent reason except for having lots of tabs open, yet I have lots of free memory.
I was in the same camp until I upgraded to Windows 7. I installed a subset of the extensions I had installed on the old system, where Firefox used to run just fine. Only now I can hit over a gig of memory in less than a day of relatively heavy browsing, and this is more than enough to slow the browser down a whole hell of a lot. Something is obviously wrong. Not wrong enough that I'm going to switch browsers, but wrong enough that I'm a little pissed they won't take some time to dig into it and fix it.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
OS: Ubuntu 10.04 64bit
CPU: AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1055T Processor @ 3.3ghz
RAM: 4GB DDR2 800mhz
Chromium 9 alpha: 9.0.563.0 (63660) Ubuntu 10.04
FireFox 4 beta: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101020 Firefox-4.0/4.0b8pre
Opera 11 alpha: Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux x86_64; U; en) Presto/2.6.37 Version/11.00 - build 1029
Sunspider Benchmark(Lower is Better):
214.6ms - Opera
246.6ms - Chromium
252.8ms - Firefox
V8 Benchmark(Higher is Better):
Score: 5499 - Chromium
Score: 4695 - Opera
Score: 3374 - Firefox
Dromaeo JavaScript Test Benchmark(Higher is Better):
590.07runs/s (Total) - Chromium
399.95runs/s (Total) - Opera
399.25runs/s (Total) - Firefox
To be fair at time of writing this there was 7 newer nightly builds for Chromium. Regards to Firefox, is their JagerMonkey engine based on webkit?
Then you clearly dont know what the swap file is for.
Hint: Its there for stuff your computer doesnt need anymore and who's memory can be better used elsewhere.
right now I have 197 tabs open, and consume 428MB of ram on a system with 2GB.
I do have noscript installed however. If this were not the case I could see the memory consumption being much higher.
The thing about you Firefox supporters is that you aren't heavy web users. You think that a few hours of casual browsing is enough to make a comparison on.
Citation needed. Where the hell you get the idea that Firefox users are not heavy web users? If you want to say the same thing about IE maybe I can accept it.
While I see great evidence of this it still must be understood that you cannot just claim there is a bug with out providing some sort of backing to your claim. Not that anyone is necessarily lying but with out further information no one is going to be able to plug any leaks or fix any bugs. Primarily that is what I see in relation to this claim. You see a comment saying FF sucks! I do something with it and it is claiming $somehugeamount of RAM!!! With out knowing the complexity of each page loaded at that time, what plugins and other technologies are involved and possibly interacting with each other how do you expect the problem to get fixed?
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
You're right, but wait, so is he, in a way. I'd in no way want to disable a swap file for performance, but, if FF thinks it can use that much of total available memory for a given computer, then something is wrong. (IIRC, FF lets you tweak all that, but I gave up using it in favour of Chrome)
If you have 90-120 opened tabs then you have more serious problems than memory leaks :).
Well, if it sucks, maybe you should implement a vacuum cleaner with it.
Tried that, it chokes.
The thing about you Firefox supporters is that you aren't heavy web users. [...]
Say what?! That has got to be the most hilarious statement I ever heard in this debate. Besides, it is up for debate. I had FF running for days at a time, and the last time it ran out of memory for me was around the introduction of the first v3 betas.
I am a web developer. I usually have ~10 JS heavy tabs open continuously over the day, plus those that I open and close during "normal" browsing. I run nightly builds, have been for several years without major issues. I have 21 extensions installed, many of whom in beta or nightly builds. And the only thing that consistently gives me trouble is the Flash plugin.
Again: I do not dispute that Firefox has issues. But memory leaks are way overblown.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
how much of those have big or animated images?
IIRC, caches images in ram and specially animated images (gif and apng) can eat many for each frame:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=523950
so the problem might be probably that many images are bigger than they should be and uses more animations than they should.
the the sad true is that most webpages are too bloat and heavy, if one have too many open tabs, that bloat will slowly end eating your ram (no matter what browser you have)
Higuita
dancing blinking crap?
1-most of those screenshots come from FF2
2-most of those problems are memory leaks for extensions or plugins (did someone said flash!!)
3-what loaded pages they had? each page have their own requirement... having 1 google image search, some flirk pages and a grooveshark page might eat more RAM than hundred of text only wikipedia pages
not that FF4 is problem free, but most people dont compare memory usage in a fair way... they must use the latest version, without extensions and open (and click, scroll, mouse over, etc) the same pages on both browsers
Higuita
And I bet that isn't what was tested as it has issues. There is more speed to come.
I bet you wouldn't be saying that if you had to wait for a page reload every time you click a Slashdot link...
No sig today...
I'm still waiting for a response. Why haven't you responded?
Why can't you explain to me why I am not seeing these problems?
You were so eager to prove me wrong, which you failed to do but you still didn't have the courtesy to even answer my only question. Why don't I see these problems?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I had that problem before discovering the BarTab extension. It fits my usage pattern well.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"days" try "months"
You prove the very point in which you try to argue against.
"Heavy web user" to me implies many open tabs, JavaScript-heavy websites, many add-ons and extensions. I know nobody in person who leaves their browser open for more than a few days at a time, not even with hibernation. How do you manage to achieve such "uptimes"? Do you never install browser or OS updates?
No offense: You may qualify for the Gold edition geek card, but you are not a "heavy web user", you are a fringe case.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
VERY useful. I've just installed it. Thanks!