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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...
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.
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.
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.
The Firefox developers care. Because it means that they finally are no longer much slower than the competition (given the small difference in the current benchmark, I'd say a more accurate headline would be "Firefox has caught up with Chrome speed).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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
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.
from http://arewefastyet.com/faq.html:
"3. Why isn't Opera/IE/something here?
Right now, the performance tests are run on a Mac, which means no IE. Also the tests rely on a "shell" JS engine that runs in a command line. It doesn't test browsers. We'll change that, eventually."
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
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.
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.
So what? Anyone doing that would just deprive himself from the fun of playing.
That only applies to multiplayer games. For those I'd expect the game logic to reside mostly on the server anyways. For games where this is not appropriate, JavaScript is not the right choice, I agree. But that's not the category of games which I'd expect to be browser based anyway.
In short, you can block ads in the browser. Yes, that's nothing new, and nothing specific to JavaScript and games.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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.
Yeah, a good benchmark would be how long it takes to show a Slashdot page with 500+ comments.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Whatever language the game is written in, those bits of the game which run locally on the client as opposed to the server are prone to cheating... Just because a game comes as a precompiled blob doesn't mean it's not possible, plenty of people use such cheats with closed source games all the time.
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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.
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.
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/
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."
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.
Tired of http? Lets move on to gopher..
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).
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.
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 :-)
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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? ;-)
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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.
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.
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.
You've answered your own question already.
I am not devoid of humor.
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.
You assume that it's impossible to verify the last gamestate against the player's current actions.
If you say, "but my game is too complicated to do that," then maybe Javascript isn't the right platform for your game.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
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)
"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!