Firefox On Linux Gets Faster Builds — To Be Fast As Windows

dkd903 writes "Mozilla's Mike Hommey has announced on his blog that his team at Mozilla has finally managed to get the Linux builds of Firefox to use GCC 4.5 with aggressive optimization and profile guided optimization enabled. All this simply means that we can now expect a faster and less sluggish Firefox browser on Linux (both 32 bit and 64 bit systems)."

Comments

But no real 3d accelleration

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad Linux sucks so bad at 3D acceleration that Firefox is stuck in a CPU rendering world.

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[atari2600a]

Acceleration works just fine depending on the drivers. Nvidia proprietary is going great, though I'm not sure about Intel. ATI Isn't even in the game. But yeah, ever since Flash 10.2 & the more recent major Chrome revisions, no more 2FPS flash video on a netbook! Haven't exactly been following FF but yeah...

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[SquirrelDeth]

Linux does not suck at 3d proprietary drivers suck at 3d.

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[RobbieThe1st]

I'd call you a troll, but some people do have this issue.
For me, however, I have way better luck on Linux than anything else.
Running this stress test: http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/
gives me: 450fps* in FF 6.0A1(latest nightly), 45fps in Reconq, and about 30fps in Chrome!

(*Note: Set minimum timeout to 0 in ff prefs, also remove the two lines of code in the above test that limit the output number to 60fps)
Compare this to about 22fps on Windows XP on Firefox on my fathers machine, which is almost as powerful as mine(Phenom x4 3.2ghz vs. Phenom II x4 3.5) - No HW acceleration there.
So yea, I like Linux. I upgraded to it from XP a few years back and am loving it.

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[The End Of Days]

Don't let facts stop you from accusations of trolling. We wouldn't want the Linux fanboys to start acting reasonably.

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[the linux geek]

So how do the open-source drivers do at 3D, exactly? Last time I looked, Nouveau was highly unstable and 15-20x slower than the official driver...

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[theweatherelectric]

It's worth looking again: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nouveau_2639_flip&num=1

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux does not suck at 3d proprietary drivers suck at 3d.

Gotcha. The logical follow up to your statement is that Windows Vista never sucked: it was all those damn driver vendors who weren't ready. But, people (mostly rightly) put the blame on Microsoft for not getting enough of the hardware OEMs to get their shit together. Notice how Vista is fine these days? Yeah, it was mostly driver problems (and a modicum of bug fixes in the service packs). So, while it is right to say "Linux does not suck at 3d", people are hard pressed to find a Linux SYSTEM that runs 3d well and consistently with all apps that would like to use hardware rendering.

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[tuxgeek]

Open source drivers suck big time
This is why we have proprietary drivers on open source systems, specifically Nvidia.
The other card in my box is an ATI. ATI's proprietary driver is an absolute joke.

On topic, I have FF4 x86_64 running on Debian Squeeze x86_64.
Very impressive how much faster it is over the iceweasel offering that's packaged with Debian systems

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[ChrisMaple]

I'm running an nVidia Quadro NVS 290. The open-source nouveau driver has a dramatic advantage over the nVidia driver: the system doesn't crash before the GUI is fully active.

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[SquirrelDeth]

I can't honestly comment on anything after Win 98 since I started using Linux at Slackware 3.6 and never looked back. Any comment I have about Windows are speculation and hearsay. (I have fixed Windows systems for people as recent as Win 7 but that is just general computer knowledge not an understanding of Windows per se.)
As for myself I have no problems running GL on a Radeon HD 3000 (onboard) [which is a difficult to get running under any circumstances] in openSUSE 11.4 with gnome 3 but I have had problems on other distro's.

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 7, IE 9, 60+ FPS. I don't have Firefox installed. I'm primarily an Opera user. The problem with most Linux users is their comparisons with Windows are based on XP. The world has moved on but your knowledge is stuck in the past. Happy are the ignorant, I suppose.

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[Runaway1956]

Like Atari says - you should keep up with the times, and get an Nvidia graphics card. I was an ATI guy for years, but ATI has fallen by the wayside for lack of support on Linux.

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[Runaway1956]

"start acting reasonably" equates to "agree with me", correct?

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[shutdown -p now]

Linux does not suck at 3d proprietary drivers suck at 3d.

Yeah, that's exactly why the #1 3D driver recommended by Firefox devs for things to work smoothly is NVidia's proprietary driver...

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[WNight]

Microsoft gets the blame for Vista because they knew it wasn't ready but forced it into the market with sleazy dealings (bundling) even against consumer backlash.

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[DrXym]

Funny, but the first thing I do when installing a dist is install proprietary drivers. Give the choice between abysmal performance and open source, or decent performance and proprietary I'll choose the latter every single time. I'd add that 3D and X do not like each other one little bit (X is blissfully 2D at heart) and many of the problems faced by Firefox (and Flash) are directly related to all the extensions and fallbacks needed to composite 3D, 2D, video and text into the same RGB colourspace. Extensions like DRI, DRI2, Compiz (which relies on a OpenGL extension) produce a passable looking modern desktop but really X is an impediment and liability at this stage.

The sooner it is ditched for local desktop the better Linux will be in the long term. Wayland seems the most viable way to cut X out of the equation but I can't imagine what horrors are lurking in the average dist to sort out before this can happen.

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[Fri13]

I were Nvidia user last 4 years and I switched few weeks ago back to AMD (ATI) and my 3D problems were gone.
The only reason why I bought Nvidia card 4 year ago was that I could not get in time ATI card when I was moving and I know I could not have time to buy a card for next month. And now I feel stupid that in last 4 years I could have just buy a ATI but I always tought "the card itself is not broken, just the drivers so maybe next version fix problems". If I just would have spended 100€ to ATI card on that time, I would have suffered countless problems (crashes, video problems and other from drivers) less and saved money and time.

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[Runaway1956]

Odd. I think that it's widely recognized that ATI has good proprietary drivers, for it's newer cards. But, when the card reaches an age "threshold" they drop support, and refuse to release the code for the open sourcer community to maintain support.

When I switched to Nvidia, is when I found that they actually do release code so that the open source people can MAINTAIN support for older cards.

So - if you have a modern, up to date ATI, you may get better support than I get - but when that machine reaches a couple years in age, you'll lose that support, and have to rely on the X driver - which may be decent, or not.

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux does not suck at 3d proprietary drivers suck at 3d.

Then do you concede that the initial release of Vista wasn't that bad except there were no drivers? And that the OS was stable and video drivers caused over 70% of the blue screens? You can't have it both ways.

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[Anonymous Coward]

I have zero probs with an 105m nvidia and just a little instability with a radeon hd2400 proprietary drivers. radeon driver is very stable but not very usable on games. Overall I am pleased with desktop linux.

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, who thought testing and targeting one platform would make it work better? Most OpenGL applications work, yet Mozilla keeps crashing? I'd say they are doing something wrong, there might be bugs in the drivers (they should be submitted, not just blacklisted and forgotten) but they are still doing something screwy.

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[BZ]

If you set the minimum timeout to 0, you're comparing apples and oranges, since the other browsers have a minimum of at least 4. You should set it to 4 (which is the default value in the nightly anyway!).

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[RobbieThe1st]

If I was getting anywhere near even 100fps, I /would/ change the other browser settings to 0. As it is, though, no other browser's even coming close to that limitp and thus changing the minimum timeout won't change the output.
Firefox with accel, was. So I set it to 0, to see how fast it can /really/ render, and found that the 4ms timeout was the limiting factor.

Oh, and 'all browsers'? Wasn't there a big stink recently over the fact that IE9 set it to 0, and had higher numbers because of it?

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[BZ]

> So I set it to 0, to see how fast it can /really/
> render, and found that the 4ms timeout was the
> limiting factor.

While that's reasonable, I think presenting both numbers (along with that explanation) would make a much stronger case for "Firefox kicks the other browsers butts on this benchmark" (which it does!)

As for IE9, the measurements Robert did of IE9 showed that it sets the timeout clamp to 4ms unless there's canvas interaction going on, in which case the clamp ends up at 3.5ms. Not quite the same as 0, and we didn't make a big stink of it exactly... ;)

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[Sin2x]

You are either crazy or misinformed or lying. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_hardware_and_FOSS#ATI.2FAMD

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[uradu]

Not so sure about that. I'm running Ubuntu on an Athlon 2700+ and both Chromium and Firefox absolutely choke on anything with more than one Flash animation on it. This is particularly bad with Google Reader rendering Flash loaded tech feeds, so much so that the scroll wheel on the mouse is totally useless--scrolling the page takes about 1 second for each jump. Booting into Windows XP and reading the very same feeds is buttery smooth, so the machine still has plenty of horsepower. And yes, Flash, Ubuntu, both browsers, and the Nvidia proprietary drivers are all on the latest versions. Considering that web use makes up 90% of my use of the machine this makes for a very unsatisfying experience, even though I very much prefer to live a Windows-less life.

Re:But no real 3d accelleration

[atari2600a]

Odd, perhaps there's something involving 3D accel in Chrome that's not FOSS'd...

To be present in firefox 6

[Anonymous Coward]

The optimisations will be enabled in Firefox 6... is that the version that comes out this week or the week after?

Re:To be present in firefox 6

[Samantha Wright]

I'm guessing next week. The current Firefox nightlies (codenamed "Nightly", amusingly) are versioned 6.0a1.

Re:To be present in firefox 6

[Professor_UNIX]

WTF happened to Firefox 5? I am running the newest build I can find and it is Firefox 4.0.1 on Ubuntu 11.04.

Re:To be present in firefox 6

[starofale]

It appears you haven't heard about the new Firefox release schedule.
https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/

Firefox 4 is the stable channel
There is no beta build currently
Firefox 5 is in the Aurora channel
Firefox 6 is in the Nightly channel

Re:To be present in firefox 6

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty sure you're mistaken.

Nightly is a nightly build of the next release (currently Firefox 5).
Beta is a beta of the next release (again, Firefox 5).
Aurora is something in between nightly and beta of the next release (yep, still Firefox 5).

Re:To be present in firefox 6

[Runaway1956]

I haven't really kept up, so I don't know exactly what the various channels are supposed to be. But, I know that I have the nightly channel enabled in Synaptic, and that my Nightly reports itself to be 6.0a1 My Namoroka, on the other hand, reports itself to be 3.6.18pre I might get interested enough to figure out where versions 4 and 5 are. Then again - maybe not.

Re:To be present in firefox 6

[Samantha Wright]

Four was released, and I'd imagine that Aurora is five.

Re:To be present in firefox 6

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and here I thought they were following in the tradition of Netscape and skipping 5.

Re:To be present in firefox 6

[silanea]

Are you sure? I understood Nightly to be the latest successfully compiling build of the trunk regardless of targeted releases - which is why it is often two or more releases ahead in terms of included features. Hence, its version is currently given as 6.0a1, the latest currently envisioned release version, which will be updated to whatever is next on the roadmap. Genuinely asking, I thought that was the description at the time I started using Mindefield years ago.

Re:To be present in firefox 6

[starofale]

You are correct, nightly is the latest build from mozilla-central. I was saying that currently Nightly = Firefox 6, although this will change in the future.

Re:To be present in firefox 6

[starofale]

No. You are wrong. Check the link I gave - it shows Aurora is Firefox 5.0a2, Beta hasn't been released yet and Stable is Firefox 4.0.1
You can also see that Nightly is currently Firefox 6.0a1 here ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/

Re:To be present in firefox 6

[starofale]

For more information about the new Firefox release schedule, see http://mozilla.github.com/process-releases/draft/development_overview/ and http://mozilla.github.com/process-releases/draft/development_specifics/

YES!

[supersloshy]

As a long-time Firefox and GNU/Linux fan, this is excellent news. Whenever I use Firefox on even the most basic windows installs, it's always faster than my desktop running Arch Linux. It lags left and right, sometimes takes forever to switch tabs, but it's not unusable. Thanks Mozilla for remembering that you have a lot of Linux-using fans! :)

Re:YES!

[larry bagina]

Do the math. Windows has 85-90% market share. Desktop Linux is < 1%. Even if 100% of linux users used firefox and 1% of windows users used firefox, Windows users would still outnumber Linux users.

Firefox is basically a windows program that they slowed down with XUL shit in a half-assed attempt to be cross-platform.

Re:YES!

[supersloshy]

Can you please not troll and actually talk constructively? YES, I know that the Linux marketshare isn't as large, that's why I'm thanking them for their support! Firefox isn't excessively slow; it's only slow on non-Windows platforms (most notably Linux) because it's more optimized for Windows.

Re:YES!

[Saint Stephen]

But if 100% of 1% of the people use FF on Linux, that's 1%. If 1% of 85-90% of the people use FF on Windows, that's 0.85% to 0.9% of the people. It's less people! Your analogy doesn't work.

Re:YES!

[Anonymous Coward]

XUL is not shit, it's what gives you the flexibility with regards to plugins. Without XUL, you'd end up with something like Chrome. Which is fine, but the plug-in opportunities are limited..

Re:YES!

[Anonymous Coward]

... fewer people
; )

Re:YES!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets do the math. Lets have some assumptions

Lets say there are 1,000,000 users.
There is only linux and windows

99% use windows, 1% use linux.
That is 990,000 million users for windows

Leaving 10,000 for linux.

His math is wrong as 990,000 * 0.01 is 9900 people. vs 10,000.

Now the reality of the mater is about 40% of the market uses firefox.

So the math works out about like this

990,000 * .4 = 396,000
vs
10,000 *.4 = 4,000 (this is probably wrong and on the low side)

While it is nice for them to put some work towards it. It is not hitting the 90% mark in optimization. Which is you hit the high profile ones first then work towards the lower profile slow stuff.

In this case even IF 100% of all linux users used FF it would still not come close to even the 40% share on windows.

It makes sense for the Mozilla team to focus on windows. It is their largest customer base. Linux however is probably the most vocal one. I think it is good the whole mozilla team has taken a keen interest in making their browser run better. After 3.0 it was obvious they didnt care as much... It shows they are at least getting the right attitude. The biggest driving factor here is Chrome lighting a fire under their ass's to say 'hey do this better, or become irrelevant'. MS learned that the hard way and it will take them a long time to gain back that mojo (if they can).

Re:YES!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want Firefox compiled with PGO under Arch, use the aptly named "firefox-pgo" package from the AUR:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=22296

hint: don't expect miracles, a refined firefox compile won't metamorphose a sluggish desktop.

Re:YES!

[larry bagina]

I wrote: " Desktop Linux is < 1%".

Re:YES!

[donaldm]

Actually the desktop Linux market is much higher than 1% which was coined by ill informed journalists back in the early 2000's and even today we still see that quote carried forward. The Linux desktop market in most so called first world countries may be small but it is at least greater than 5% and in third world countries it much higher still, however the problem is how to come up with figures since most desktop PC's sold come with a MS OS (The Microsoft tax) and that makes it difficult to determine what number have had a Linux distribution put on them.

For those people who say that a Microsoft solution for the desktop is the a logical way for any company to go I would say "Bull" (actually I do have to tendency to use more colourfull speech) and have experience and knowledge to back that up. The basic reason why desktop Linux is behind MS Windows is 1) The Microsoft tax and 2) The intransigence of management (not willing to change). In addition "Games for Windows" locked the avid gamer into a Microsoft OS however that is only an acceptable excuse at the moment for the home user, not for the corporate user unless you count games as an important factor in choosing an OS for the corporate world.

I have been using Linux for home use and in business for over four years and really don't miss any of the Microsoft OS's.

Re:YES!

[Compaqt]

Preach it.

What's funny about FF bugs is the continual denial, until they actually comes out with a version that fixes something. (Remember the memory bugs, and how it wouldn't release memory after closing tabs?)

Anyway, FF is fast and light on Windows. I often have 10s of windows with 10s of tabs in them (database, sql, programming language, HTML, other references). CPU load is light (max 13% or so, usually 3% for FF).

On Linux (Ubuntu)? FF is a hog. I only run it on the odd site that doesn't work with Chrome. Load often goes to 70, even 90% with most of that for FF.

It's not just a different algorithm for CPU time. The fan starts spinning, too. That's just with a single window with a few tabs. I don't dare run it as my primary "reference" browser.

Re:YES!

[asa]

This is "usage" as measured by the number of visits to websites across the world using different operating systems. There is no bias here because of what system the machine came with. This is the system as it's running when connecting to the Web.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-quarterly-200803-201102

Linux is below 1% and falling. Linux on the desktop is almost imperceptible.

Re:YES!

[Anonymous Coward]

I use opera on Ubuntu Linux. It cleanly out performs other browsers.

 

Re:YES!

[Samantha Wright]

People is a mass noun now!

Re:YES!

[goarilla]

This is slashdot, here you have people being pedantic/precise about the math, spelling, grammar and punctuation of your posts !

Re:YES!

[Krneki]

What is even funnier is the fact that FF under wine is as fast as the Windows version.

Re:YES!

[MrHanky]

That's not what a fall looks like, and ten million++ people aren't imperceptible.

Re:YES!

[aliquis]

I've used 3.x on an old OS X installation so things has probably improved but yeah, UI rendering vs page rendering in firefox rules, not.

I assume chrome or opera is better. (compared to said version, 4.x and later may have improved a lot, I can't use them so I don't know.)

Re:YES!

[DaVince21]

Actually, Linux usage share seems to be around 1.8% for Linux users (rough estimate, naturally). It's a small percentage, but imagine how many people on the world use operating systems, and now think about how many people 1.8% can be. Furthermore, Macs have about four times that amount of people and they have slower Firefox too (until this fix).

Source used: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_market_share

Yes, I just went all reasonable on a troll.

Re:YES!

[BZ]

> What's funny about FF bugs is the continual denial,

Uh... I have yet to meet a single Firefox developer who doesn't think Firefox on Linux is slower than on Windows, with the difference in compiler quality being one of the major contributors to the difference. Care to point to a place where someone denied this?

Re:YES!

[Anonymous Coward]

Preach it.

What's funny about FF bugs is the continual denial, until they actually comes out with a version that fixes something. (Remember the memory bugs, and how it wouldn't release memory after closing tabs?)

Did they fixed this? I've still seen it in FF4

You poor deluded fools.

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft Internet Explorer is clearly superior in every way.

Re:You poor deluded fools.

[maxwell demon]

Microsoft Internet Explorer is clearly superior in every way.

Especially on Linux. :-)

Re:You poor deluded fools.

[JerryLindenburg]

Look man, if it's not IE 6, it's not a browser.

I really like the calming blue backgrounds I get on "transparent" png files, and how it's always downloading cool stuff when I don't tell it to.

Re:You poor deluded fools.

[Samantha Wright]

Onwards Mozilla Soldiers,
Onwards Opera Priests.
Onward, Fruits of Google,
Fight till you're deceased.
Fight your little battles.
Join in thickest fray;
For the Greater Glory,
of M-S-I-E.
Yah, yah, yah,
Yah, yah, yah, yah.
Blfffffffffffft!

Re:You poor deluded fools.

[shutdown -p now]

Absolutely. For one thing, IE is 100% secure on Linux! ~

Only with Firefox 6, though

[moonbender]

From TFA:

However according to Hommey, these new faster and less sluggish builds of Firefox for Linux will be available only from Firefox 6 onwards and we expect the first beta of Firefox 6 to available only by September - October 2011.

Re:Only with Firefox 6, though

[Anonymous Coward]

How many years have we had to wait for this? So much for Firefox on Linux - better to use a Linux friendly browser...

Re:Only with Firefox 6, though

[kvvbassboy]

True this. I am testing the nightly build on both Windows Vista and Ubuntu 11.04,and it hasn't crashed on me yet. And I can confirm that it is extremely smooth on Ubuntu, I would in fact say that it's perceptibly smoother than the Windows build.

Most extensions don't work yet, which is expected. Although, AdBlock, NoScript and WoT surprisingly work.

Kudos to the Mozilla team for their brilliant browser.

Re:Only with Firefox 6, though

[Anonymous Coward]

How many years have we had to wait for this? So much for Firefox on Linux - better to use a Linux friendly browser...

Such as?

Re:Only with Firefox 6, though

[somersault]

Chrome is excellent on Linux. FF definitely more sluggish.

Re:Only with Firefox 6, though

[supersloshy]

I think by "Linux Friendly", he meant that it was developed with Linux mainly in mind, and that it integrates well with it. I love Epiphany for GNOME, honestly, as a second choice. It has tabs on bottom by default (slashdot trolls, take note!), it runs fast and with low memory, it has a built-in ad blocker, and it integrates with GNOME 3 perfectly. It isn't as feature-filled as Chrome, but it works very well.

Oh, and you can't forget Lynx/Links for Linux browsers ;)

Re:Only with Firefox 6, though

[donaldm]

Chrome is excellent on Linux. FF definitely more sluggish.

I use both on Fedora depending on what I am doing. Personally I like Chrome's minimalistic display however my family prefer Firefox since it what they are use to.

Re:Only with Firefox 6, though

[Anne Honime]

Did they fix their little font problems ? I gave up on chrome under linux because whenever I finally managed to get proper anti-aliased fonts, each time the next new version would wreck havoc and send you back to the dark ages of pixelated characters. My eyes are too old to bear with that stupid game. This, and of course, the stupid use of the title bar to store tabs that have nothing to do into my window manager layout.

Re:Only with Firefox 6, though

[Anonymous Coward]

Most extensions don't work yet

And this is very likely the smoothness difference right there. :)
AdBlock takes a good part of the performance cake on loading. (But it's worth it a thousand times! :)

(Although Linux generally being better in many tasks than Windows — as can be seen when running (working) thinks in Wine — could also be a good factor.)

Re:Only with Firefox 6, though

[somersault]

Can't say I've ever noticed that. If the font is too small I just press control and scroll the mouse wheel up (or control-plus)

Re:Only with Firefox 6, though

[BZ]

Of course Mozilla itself is aiming at a Firefox 6 release in August, so a "first beta" in Sept/Oct would be a neat feat, a month or two after final release!

I was a firefox user

[JerryLindenburg]

I loved Firefox for the longest time.
I did. When it came out, it was so light and fast, that it put it's predecessor the Mozilla browser to shame. It was no contest. I even went so far as to buy the T-shirt, and go out of my way to enlighten every non techie friend I possibly could about it.

Over the years, Firefox got slower as my computer got faster. A lot slower, but I had to keep the update cycle going on my machine because for the most part... I didn't really have a choice. Today, Firefox on Ubuntu is almost totally unusable. It sucks up 99% of my system resources when I have two gmail windows open, it's always processing weird network requests, and it's so incredibly slow that I just don't feel like I want to have anything to do with the browser anymore.

Meanwhile, Google Chrome has added a Bookmark manager, and Firebug is available. Chrome also gets very regular updates from Google, and even with every possible stupid extension I like, it doesn't slow down. Granted, half of my extensions don't work right, and that's annoying, but the browser itself does what I want, at the speed I want it.

I really think Firefox has missed the boat here.
I might change my mind, but I'm in absolutely no hurry to try it out (as a web browser, it's a marvelous sqlite tool) again.

Re:I was a firefox user

[drb226]

You may want to try Opera sometime. Absolutely pitiful for extensions, not quite as standards-friendly as the open-source alternatives, but the way it renders pages is very snappy.

Re:I was a firefox user

[JerryLindenburg]

Right on. I tried opera on my windows phone awhile back. I tried to get them to buy Android phones last year at work, but the windows phones were a better deal at the time. We all got HTC Touch Pro's, and I've regretted signing the check for it ever since.

Mobile IE was adequate, but didn't do everything I wanted it to, and even with the recent makeover it got awhile back, it still doesn't feel like a modern browser to me.

So I thought I would try opera mobile, see what all the hype was about.

It didn't work.
Of course, nothing I install on my windows phone seems to work, so I don't know off hand if it's the application's problem.

Will definitely check it out.
Thanks for reminding me that Opera still exists!

Re:I was a firefox user

[Anonymous Coward]

Missed what boat?

Firefox is many things, but it is not spyware. Being an open source products puts it in a completely different category than malware.

Re:I was a firefox user

[SquirrelDeth]

Today, Firefox on Ubuntu is almost totally unusable./p>

Are you sure Ubuntu is totally unusable?

Re:I was a firefox user

[TaoPhoenix]

"Staying on topic of Firefox",

Sounds like you're a Speed fan. So a great technique I learned a while ago is "Blue Sky" thinking - just suppose you wake up one day and an Aurora Build of FF has some Crazy optimization that makes it all go 3X faster. Would you return to Firefox?

I think the very low barrier to entry from the user perspective that woke us up from an IE-dominated web is now getting a little gritty. Feels to me we're sorta playing them off each other now.

I'm a solid FF fan. Sure, they cycled between speed, then more on features, but I'll gladly trade FF's versatility for some slight amount of speed Chrome might have.

Re:I was a firefox user

[JerryLindenburg]

I like using Ubuntu. Not crazy about the updating issues it has.

But that's a very minor complaint, considering.
Back in the day we would re-install Windows every six months or so.

Ubuntu's the same deal.
Now if would just work, and stay working without constant tinkering with the things the updates break, we would be in business.

Re:I was a firefox user

[cbhacking]

What's your beef with Opera's standards support? It's certainly better than Firefox's, and about on par with Chrome (among other things, it tied Chrome for the first working ACID3 implementation).

Re:I was a firefox user

[Samantha Wright]

Related to your facetious point, the title of the submission appears to read that the Linux builds of Firefox will be faster than the Windows operating system. Bravo, GCC 4.5! Bravo!

Re:I was a firefox user

[Anonymous Coward]

You may want to try Opera sometime. Absolutely pitiful for extensions, not quite as standards-friendly as the open-source alternatives, but the way it renders pages is very snappy.

I would say Opera is more standards friendly then the open source alternatives, it certainly follows the formalised web standards more strictly and have support for many parts of the standards that have not yet been implemented in Firefox or Chrome, e.g. today: most standard-conformant browser implementation of Unicode, CSS, XML, (X)HTML, HTTP, SVG. ECMA script, W3C HTML DOM; historically: first implementation of CSS, first implementation of SVG, first ECMA script implementation. More web-pages work well with a Gecko and Webkit based browser than with Opera, because most web-pages don't follow formalised standards, the pages are made to work with specific web browsers.

You could claim that e.g. Opera has less support for SVG then Firefox and from one point of view that is true. Opera have full support for SVG Basic (and SVG Tiny), while Firefox have partial support for SVG Full (as well as partial support for SVG Tiny and SVG Basic). But that only proves that Firefox is less standards friendly, it implements standards only partially and make it harder to create web pages that follows standards and work with all browsers (a.k.a. graceful degradation).

Re:I was a firefox user

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely pitiful for extensions, not quite as standards-friendly as the open-source alternatives,

. At least the API for extensions seems to be there, and last I remembered opera was one of the most standards-compliant browsers out there It definitely passes the Acid3 test (contrary to Firefox), although there seems to be a regression with the second test.

Re:I was a firefox user

[xtracto]

Meanwhile, Google Chrome has a

Funny, I just uninstalled Google Chrome and installed Opera because Chrome's memory usage was horrible. Each tab wastes around 10 MB minimum... I also have Firefox 4 installed (my wife uses it) and I use Opera which is quite light and fast.

Re:I was a firefox user

[xtracto]

Care to elaborate as the standard friendliness? I am using the last version of Opera and it just passed the Acid3 test with 100/100. What other standards are there that Opera fails?

Re:I was a firefox user

[Osgeld]

it also renders pages as useless garbage, yea I use it, but its not long before I run into something opera doesnt like and its back to firefox

Re:I was a firefox user

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Opera for quite a while now for browsing, while using Firefox for development. Opera is lightning fast and has many "extensions" built in (Speeddial, Dragonfly). But it also comes with real extensions, most notably "NotScript" and "Image Viewer", which really make quick browsing even quicker.
Also Opera Link, synchronizing Speeddial on the fly, is a world apart from the new Firefox Bookmark Synch or even Google Bookmarks (Opera portable).
Opera doesn't quite cut it in web development support and rendering (which is different from standards compliance(!), where it beats FF and IE easily - try ACID3).
But for daily use, why wait a second longer? I didn't even really try Chrome, I would be surprised if it really can top Opera.

Re:I was a firefox user

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty standards friendly, and has been in the lead in standards compliance for lengthy chunks of the last several years. Browsers are leapfrogging each other left and right right now in this regard, so it might not be the case at this very instant, but standards compliance is the last thing I would mark on Opera's "con" list.

Re:I was a firefox user

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome is hugely overrated. It always manages to do something screwy when I use it and its extension API is not as powerful as Firefox. Further, Chrome phones home to Google by default and if you want to disable it, you have to change something like 5 option settings sprinkled throughout every option screen. That's just wrong. There is a lot to hate about Chrome. Chrome has some nice ideas, sure, but it's no straight up Firefox replacement. It's got a totally different philosophy. If I go with one word to sum it up, I would say that Chrome feels corporate and Firefox feels like a real open source project.

Re:I was a firefox user

[Anonymous Coward]

strange, the change to firefox 4 from the 3.x series added boatloads of speed and responsiveness...and i'm even running it on OpenBSD....with complex and large numbers of tabs sorted and running at all times. Perhaps something on your linux box is out of sync and/or the builds for your distro are using a dependency that is slowing things down. Chrome works fine too, though.

Re:I was a firefox user

[jesup]

Running Firefox on Fedora 11 - I typically have 10-15 windows open with *450* tabs - and it runs for months like that without loading the system. NOTE: Flashblock is a must, *especially* under Linux.

One thing that really does help is BarTab (under 3.x; under 4.x until it's available you can set a simple config var to get a similar result). This keeps it from actually loading tabs when restoring a session until you switch to that tab. The only way you can get away with so many tabs in any browser...

Re:I was a firefox user

[Anonymous Coward]

The "real life web usage standard", maybe?

It's getting better with each version, but there are still pages that break in subtle and not-so-subtle ways with Opera.

And, no, mimicking the Firefox user agent doesn't always fix it.

But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is great news, but this also means that Firefox's memory usage problems are still not being properly addressed.

We don't need to hear any more excuses from the Firefox crowd about this problem. Yes, it does exist. Yes, it does cause problems. Yes, it is a bug. No, it is not "intentional".

What we need is for these Firefox supports to get these memory leaks fixed. Chrome, even with its multiple processes, doesn't use as much memory as Firefox does. Opera doesn't use as much memory as Firefox does. Safari doesn't use as much memory as Firefox does. Fuck, even IE doesn't use as much memory as Firefox does.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[fbartho]

Look dude, Get your complaints right. You're bitching about Memory Footprint. Perfectly acceptable problem to bitch about.

You're not bitching about memory leaks. Memory leaks would be indicated by progressive increase in the amount of memory used over time, without functional changes is your usage of the app. That's not what's indicated by my tests on both Windows and Mac. I run with many tabs open, and FF's memory usage is directly related to the number of tabs I have open. When I shed a window or a set of tabs, FF shrinks in memory footprint.

If you were bitching about memory leaks, that would be a perfectly reproducible problem, and a standard memory profiler would catch these things, and any contributor to FF could easily submit patches to clean up the leaked memory. Memory bloat is a more systematic problem that is much harder to keep a handle on. No matter what, new features need memory to work, so as an application ages it would be prone to increase it's footprint. That's the hard problem, and that's what I think the FF team should take some time to focus on, now that they are reaching acceptable responsiveness in general.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[bunratty]

If you think you see a memory problem, the thing to do is post a set of steps that can reproduce the problem. In every test I've seen, Firefox uses less memory than other browsers. Perhaps there's a problem, but you need to point out precisely what the problem is before it can be fixed. Asking for "memory usage problems" to be fixed is a vague as asking for "security problems" or "crashes" to be fixed. If you think you see a security problem, give the specifics of the problem. If you think you see a crash, give how to reproduce it or the stack trace. Otherwise, how can anyone know which security problem or crash you're referring to?

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[Enderandrew]

Firefox uses less memory than Chrome.

And Firefox doesn't have problems or leaks, they have features which can be controlled. Rendered pages stay cached in memory, so they load faster if you hit the back button. You can disable this if you want.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[fish waffle]

I've experienced FF using over 2G of memory after some use. Who should I blame? I spent several hours to narrow it down to greasemonkey, though I'm still not sure which script.

Complaints about memory leaks will persist, even if caused by the plug-ins and extensions. Rather than dismiss and ignore the complaints it would help the overall user experience to if it were easy to identify the cause---a "standard memory profiler" may catch leaks in a (dev?) firefox build, but there's no convenient way to figure out which plug-in is causing an actual user problem, let alone where the leak comes from within a plug-in. Asking users to perform a binary search disabling plug-ins is ridiculous---an option that showed how much memory each plug-in is using would at least easily allow blame to be allocated appropriately.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[BrokenHalo]

No matter what, new features need memory to work...

Stop being reasonable. Immediately. If Firefox didn't have so many damn features, it wouldn't take up so much memory. Then the parent could whine that FF doesn't have enough features.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[fbartho]

That's a good point. As we've been sandboxing things into separate processes (re: flash), it would be great if the allocator for XUL were patched so it could know which plugin is producing/using what memory. [I'm imagining "allocateWithZone" from objective-c] Then, you could have a clear panel which would indicate which subsystems are consuming more and more memory. This would allow us to point at various builds of greasemonkey (from your example) or firebug or other "fluffybunny" plugin. Further, we'd have extra data for FF crashlogs that would tell us which plugin was truly at fault in a crash, not just what thread did the crashing, but if a plugin-zone had consumed a gig of ram by itself.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[bunratty]

There's no way of knowing how much memory each extension is using. Extension code is thrown into a big JavaScript/XUL soup with shared data structures. With the new Jetpack API it may be possible to determine how much memory and CPU each extension is using. Even if some users do need to find which extension is causing memory usage problems, there is a list of the extensions that cause the most problems.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[RobbieThe1st]

I don't know why, but I don't experience these problems. Perhaps I don't have enough Greasemonkey scripts.
I mean, I typically end up with around 1.5gb or so of total system usage with:
1. 50 FF tabs open and loaded
2. FF given a memory cache of 1GB to play with
3. Firefox's disk cache symlinked to /tmp/, which has been mounted to a tmpfs(ram-backed fiesystem).
And I don't care!
See, after getting 4gb of ram, and having like 6 more in swap, I don't worry about memory usage: I want things to use as /much/ memory as they can, so I get better performance.
Sure, on a phone with 256mb, you want things to be as lightweight as possible. On a new system with 4+ gb of ram? why /not/ use it?

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[bunratty]

Then it's good that Firefox uses less memory than other browsers.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[FrostDust]

See, after getting 4gb of ram, and having like 6 more in swap, I don't worry about memory usage

The problem is, that's the equivalent of saying "There's no problem with the software. The user should just throw money at the issue and upgrade his/her system."

Even Mozilla's recommended system requirements indicate 1/8th the amount of RAM you have.

We can't daydream and imagine we can acceptably run modern websites, let alone 50 tabs of them, on decades-old machines. But if the developers themselves are recommending 512MB, then the user should have an acceptable experience at 512MB, not 4GB.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Firefox has a multitude of memory leaks, and it's trivial to trigger them. Just leave Firefox open at the end of the day. You can start getting picky about it when it's harder to reproduce.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[bunratty]

There are tons of more extensive tests than simply leaving the browser running all day, and Firefox uses the least memory in nearly all of them. Perhaps Firefox leaks on your computer, but not on mine and nearly all other users. If its trivial to trigger the memory leak you're seeing, then it should be trivial to make your own test that we can run that demonstrates this memory leak we don't seem to be able to see.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[Nutria]

Rendered pages stay cached in memory, so they load faster if you hit the back button.

My experience is that this feature only works on static pages. The problem is that in 2011 there are damned few.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[RobbieThe1st]

Microsoft recommended 128mb of ram for XP. How well does it run on that?
Microsoft recommended 1GB for Vista. Same thing.
Yea. So, recommended settings aren't anywhere what you need for good performance. Firefox will run on 512mb of ram, but unless you're still running a P4 and XP, you probably have 2GB or more.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[Anonymous Coward]

All three of your links are for for tests running Windows. Firefox works well in Windows -- the complaints about memory are from Linux users.

As far as I can tell, it's not so much "total memory" as that Firefox starts to get sluggish once the memory footprint hits 1-2G or so. The way to reproduce that was simply to use Firefox for a day on a Linux system with a lot of tabs. To achieve reasonable performance I would have to restart it daily.

I stopped attempting to report the problem or gather information due to the hostile situation that's developed between Linux users and the devs. No doubt there's been a lot of incorrect information spread by misinformed users, but now if you report anything memory-bloat related you have to get past a lot of "I don't believe you" and "it works for me" before you get anywhere. If you are using a normal setup you are told to tweak paramters or stop extensions, and when you have done that you get told by someone else that your options are non-standard. I've tried all sorts of versions and betas and nightlies in the quest to help find a solution. Things have gotten better over time, but it's still not as good as the competition.

Now I simply use Chrome; even though it uses a lot of total memory, for whatever reason it does it get sluggish. Perhaps the root of Firefox's problem is memory management in Linux, but Chrome does work so that's what I use. I still prefer Firefox so I use it occasionally, but I don't do my main browsing in it so I can tolerate frequent restarts.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[bunratty]

I've used Firefox for weeks at a time on Linux without problems. I suppose to you it's just someone else denying the problem.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[hairyfeet]

I've had FF hit over 1.5Gb RAM after around 6 to 10 hours, even though I close tabs and only have on average 5 open. Do I know why FF does that? Nope, but I do know that Chromium based (Comodo Dragon) don't do that, so that is why I've been switching. I just fired up FF 4 to type this out and I can literally watch the CPU usage go up as I type. If I type fast enough I can even hit over 60% on the 1.8Ghz Sempron I use for a low power nettop. Hell just sitting here doing nothing it is using 24% CPU, that's just nuts. I also have been running it less than 5 minutes with 3 tabs open and am already over 300Mb, and we are talking about /. set to classic mode. Again just nuts.

So yeah, it ain't just him. Since FF 3.6.x things have been going downhill for me on the low power machines, and FF 4 is nearly unusable. Not using any weird extensions either, just ABP, NoScript, and ForecastFox.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[Runaway1956]

The most memory I've ever seen my Firefox using was just over 1.5 gig. I closed about 30 tabs, and the memory dropped to about .5 gig. So - you might blame yourself for having so many windows and tabs open?

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[Runaway1956]

I'll add to what RobbieThe 1st said.

Memory is getting relatively cheaper and cheaper. We demand that our OS as well as our browser do more and more. Sandboxing, preloading sites, javascript tasks, Flash and Java, along with music and movie playback in various encodings.

Today, if I were selling machines, I would be ashamed to sell a machine with less than 4 gig of memory installed. I tell everyone to load their board with all the memory it will hold - typically, 4 sticks of 2 GB. It won't be wasted. People who have invested in boards that support more than 8 gig are almost certainly going to load those boards to the max, as well - because they have a use for the board and the memory.

It isn't just "throwing money" at a problem. It's a matter of realism.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[Runaway1956]

I leave multiple instances and multiple versions of Firefox open for weeks - and I don't notice all this leakage that's being talked about. Firefox sometimes seems to USE a lot of memory - but when I notice that, I look to see how many windows and tabs I have open, and close some. Memory usage drops significantly when I do.

Firefox isn't perfect, but it isn't the piece of shit that some here seem to think.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[SanityInAnarchy]

For what it's worth, Jetpack seems to be very similar to Chrome's extension API, and we can see the memory and CPU footprint of extensions in Chrome.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[Anonymous Coward]

How about catching up with the competition and implementing one process per tab? Yeah, they've talked about it, the way Mozilla always has, but when is it actually going to be released? Then I can mitigate the memory problems by selectively closing tabs, or be able to narrow in on the test cases to reproduce the problem.

This dismissive attitude is just a continuation of a long-running one from the Mozilla people. I stopped trying to be involved a long time ago because of this. In my case they tried to tell me it was a problem with my operating system that I was getting blue-screens of death in Windows 2000 (in the nVidia display driver). An application could never be responsible for such a thing, least of all the precious Mozilla app. Some sort of elitist Linux thing. Some time later (as posted here on /.), it turned out that Seamonkey had a massive problem leaking bitmap handles on Windows (hence the BSOD: it consumed all of the available resources on the system, which is no mean feat).

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[amn108]

I for one, don't notice any problems. I am not saying they aren't present, I am just stating that at my setup they are not noticed at all.

What's your system specs and usage scenario?

I surf the Web with AdBlock Plus, Stylish and Default Full Zoom Level extensions on a Thinkpad T43 with 1Gb of RAM, Ubuntu 10.04.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[fbartho]

I completely agree that FF4 uses CPU like never before. That said, in spite of using that much CPU, it feels responsive as hell. Way more responsive than previous versions. It's unfortunate that it does that at the expense of other processes. That said, the GP was bitching about memory leaks, as in runaway memory usage that doesn't shrink back down. I'm running over 60 tabs in 6 windows, my system uptime is 13 days, and I last relaunched FF4 when I last rebooted. I'm running Flashblock, Adblock Plus, Firebug, Greasemonkey, Better GMail2, Personas, and Personas rotator as my extensions. With all that, I see memory usage of 1.34gb which is down as of Tuesday. (I purged a window/project's worth of tabs after then)

To me, in spite of it appearing to idle at 40%cpu the snappiness is very impressive. I'm seeing no instance of memory leak. The process memory footprint appears to be directly correlated to the number of tabs I have open. Does your experience differ?

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[arth1]

I've had Firefox on Linux (which is the issue here) with NO extensions and NO extra tabs grow to close to 2 GB of memory use, just sitting idly on a page.
A user left Firefox running in a detached VNC session, and it sat there for a couple of weeks, and that was the result.

On a single-user system without background tasks or local disk access, the high memory use can be defended. On multi-user systems or where the user might want the extra memory for disk cache, it can't. It's plain ridiculous.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[Runaway1956]

Version? I've already noted that I'm using two versions of Firefox, 3.6.18 and 6.0a. And, I've never seen two gig of memory in use, unless I combined the usage of both browsers.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[Fri13]

In any environment if you can make code better and use hardware as optimally as possible, then it is always worth of it.

I can not understand anyway how a dozen of web sites can take hundreds of megabytes of RAM when you can actually store the web sites on disk in much smaller size and you do not even need to pull down the pipe the amount of data what browser use on them in RAM.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[DrXym]

Firefox has a multitude of memory leaks, and it's trivial to trigger them. Just leave Firefox open at the end of the day. You can start getting picky about it when it's harder to reproduce.

What are you doing when you leave Firefox open? Perhaps it is the JS in the page which is "leaking", i.e. holding strong references to objects that it continuously allocates.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[digitalchinky]

You seem to be forgetting that we've moved on from Mosaic good sir :-)

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[MauganRa]

Which page? Some webpages run scripts which load more and more data (for example news) and if such a page is not being reloaded from time to time, they will simply keep the data.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[hairyfeet]

Sorry if I didn't make it clear, but I'm seeing the memory problem as well. I have 1.5Gb of RAM in this nettop and FF after 4 or 5 hours will suck down all 1.5Gb and cause the machine to start swapping like mad. Now I shut down tabs when I'm not using them, and if I have more than 4 open it is incredibly rare. FF just doesn't seem to give memory back when you close a tab, at least not the full amount it took, so with every tab you seem to lose a little more memory. This is on XP SP3 BTW in case anyone is wondering.

And WTF is with the CPU usage? If you are on XP download the free version of Anvir task manager and have it run in the tray while you are using FF. I have a grand total of three tabs open and I can literally watch FF climb on CPU usage with every stroke of the keyboard and if I type fast enough I can spike the hell out of it, just by typing text in a text box? WTF? It is a text box WTF is it doing?

Again do I know WHY FF is doing that? Nope, don't have a clue as to why, all I know is Chromium based like Dragon do NOT do that while having the same features, so I have a feeling I'm gonna be saying goodbye to FF. I shouldn't have to have a fricking dual core just to type in a bloody text box!!

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[mr_mischief]

The fact that there's a program or four in many a page may have something to do with that.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[Reality Master 101]

If you were bitching about memory leaks, that would be a perfectly reproducible problem...

I don't know why the Firefox team can't reproduce it, but before I gave up on Firefox in favor of Chrome, it was trivially easy to reproduce on my system (which used no plugins, by the way). Open a page, close the page. Memory goes up. Open a page, close the page. Memory goes up. Etc, etc. I had to restart FF several times a day because my system would slow to a crawl as memory climbed over 2GB. It was a classic MEMORY LEAK.

Apparently there are people who can get Firefox to work for them, but there are a LOT of people for whom Firefox is a huge fail because of the memory problems. Well, that and the fact Firefox is dog slow these days compared to Chrome, but I digress.

Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed.

[fbartho]

FF4 is the first time I noticed sever performance improvement. Before that, I was using FF in-spite of it being slower, because of its plugins and the differing design decisions from Chrome. Since FF4 I can happily say that it isn't slowing me down anymore. I did exhibit memory leaks before 3.0 and in early 3.0 builds, but those more or less got solved for my usage. Sorry to hear that that doesn't work out for you!

A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[avalys]

However according to Hommey, these new faster and less sluggish builds of Firefox for Linux will be available only from Firefox 6 onwards and we expect the first beta of Firefox 6 to available only by September - October 2011.

So, Firefox 1.0 came out in Fall 2004, and only in Fall 2011 will the Linux version be as fast as the Windows version?

Only more evidence that Linux on the desktop is still a toy for masochistic nerds.

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

However according to Hommey, these new faster and less sluggish builds of Firefox for Linux will be available only from Firefox 6 onwards and we expect the first beta of Firefox 6 to available only by September - October 2011.

So, Firefox 1.0 came out in Fall 2004, and only in Fall 2011 will the Linux version be as fast as the Windows version?

Only more evidence that Linux on the desktop is still a toy for masochistic nerds.

actually, there are multiple version of the firefox code recompiled with optimization for linux (i tried a few when all webkit based browsers would freeze my system when scrolling, i now use conkeror), mozilla has been optimizing the executable size instead of its speed (for linux at least, idk how they compile for other operating systems). now they are simply compiling with optimization for speed. its nothing new and it should have been done from the start, but it really has nothing to do with the operation system.

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[kvvbassboy]

Wow, this has been modded up? Insult or troll all you want, but "a toy for masochistic nerds." is plain incorrect.

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[MSG]

I think that the lack of guided optimization on gcc is a fair indication that Microsoft offers a better compiler, but I also think it's a long way from "gcc lacks an option that helps Firefox" to "Linux is for masochists". Seriously, Firefox scored better on some JS benchmarks on Windows than it did on Linux, but that doesn't make the Linux version unusable or painful.

Anyway, many of us don't use GNU/Linux because it is unfailingly better than alternatives, but because we have an understanding of and appreciation for economic and intellectual liberty which is better served by GNU systems. We regard the use of proprietary systems to be masochistic.

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[icebraining]

Says the Mac fanboy, where FF isn't optimized either.

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[RobbieThe1st]

So just grab an alpha/nightly? They've got a nice download page for em, and /usually/ they work right. Just keep one or two older nightlys around so when they /do/ break something, you can go back to that. Or simply disable updates.

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds pretty masochistic to me.

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[tombeard]

Well, actually it is. But others enjoy it too.
I offer Gentoo and Slackware as evidence of the former, RedHat and the Debians as the later.

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the Mac fanboy, where Firefox is not the default browser.

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it should have been modded up for being honest but was modded down for being honest instead. Linux fanbois just hate being shown the facts that keeps Linux in a distant third place everywhere but integrated systems and the server room run by nerds.

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[malloc]

I think that the lack of guided optimization on gcc is a fair indication that Microsoft offers a better compiler

Maybe I've misunderstood your meaning, but wasn't the whole point of this article that with a newer gcc you can use guided optimization and link-time code generation ?

Maybe its just because I use MSVC and gcc every day, but when MSVC lacks even C99 support I find it hard to call it a "better compiler".

-Malloc

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[shutdown -p now]

I think GP specifically mean "better optimizing". As far as standards compliance goes, MSVC has been lagging behind gcc ever since v3.x of the latter.

As well, MSVC is specifically declared as a C++ compiler first and foremost, and C89 secondary. C99 is not even declared. Though g++ still smokes it on standards on C++ alone.

On the other hand, I've seen MSVC successfully inline several thousands of function calls (generated via template expansions, of course), and then neatly optimize the result as an aggregate, where g++ gave up and produced a CALL after the first several hundred nestings. YMMV.

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[shutdown -p now]

The default Mac browser is so sad that it still can't close tabs on middle click.

Oh, it's because Macs don't have that button - nevermind. ~

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[radarsat1]

> C99 is not even declared.

Yes, and this is extremely annoying, that they won't commit to a much better revision of C. They leave C programmers in the dust on purpose, because they basically don't want people using C anymore. Nevermind that it some problems just simply require it.

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[MSG]

Yes, with the newer gcc, Mozilla has been able to build Firefox with better optimizations. That won't be available in Mozilla's builds for a couple of releases, though, so I don't think we're quite at the point where we can discuss Microsoft's advantage in a past tense. We're certainly almost there.

And no, I don't think that MSVC is unfailingly better than gcc, either. It has, traditionally, produced a faster Firefox.

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of curiousity -- doesn't Intel have a compiler, for both Windows and Linux, that is fairly good at tuning things for Intel hardware?

I recall there were accusations of shady behavior in the past (when ran on a competitor's processor, the runtime code would choose the "generic" path instead of the "optimized" one, the excuse being they didn't know how to detect the competitor's CPU models yet or some such) and I'm not sure on licensing or costs either.

If "speed" is the foremost aim, I would think the compiler by the CPU maker would theoretically be king...

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[shutdown -p now]

They leave C programmers in the dust on purpose, because they basically don't want people using C anymore. Nevermind that it some problems just simply require it.

Can you give an example of a problem which specifically requires C rather than C++?

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[malloc]

Fair enough. Since GCC 4.1 was released over 5 years ago maybe we're really discussing software projects simply not taking advantage of what's available.

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[luserSPAZ]

Windows builds of Firefox didn't get profile-guided optimization until Firefox 3 (2008), so it's only about 3 years behind. Actually I think Firefox 1.0 might have been shipped with PGO on Linux, but I wasn't directly involved in that release so I can't recall. Mike had to chase down a number of bugs in GCC in order to make it work again, which is nice because it benefits all GCC users. GCC developers are using Firefox as a testcase for further optimizations in GCC 4.6 (like LTO), so we should hopefully be able to use those when it's released.

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[luserSPAZ]

Not really true, we actually built our Linux builds with -Os (optimize for space) up until this change, where we switched to -O3 (optimize for speed) + changed from GCC 4.3 to GCC 4.5 and also enabled profile-guided optimization at the same time. The end result is a pretty nice performance win and not much disk space change.

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[luserSPAZ]

There were actually several GCC bugs that had to be fixed in order for us to use PGO. Thankfully Mike has a good working relationship with GCC maintainers, and he upstreamed all necessary patches, so everybody wins.

Re:A good summary of Linux on the desktop

[luserSPAZ]

Intel does have ICC, but it's kind of expensive, and it's picky in different ways than GCC/VC++, so it means fixing up things across the entire codebase to even get it to work. I was able to build our JavaScript library on OS X with ICC at one point without a huge amount of hassle, and it was a decent speedup back then (but Apple's GCC is ancient). Using it on Windows would probably be a PITA in terms of amount of work to even compare performance.

What about distributions

[camcorder]

I've been using Linux long before than even Firefox existed, but I don't remember downloading Firefox from their website (so their builds) for Linux since it was the de-facto browser of choice of Linux desktop. I believe most users of Firefox on Linux use build of their distribution. Not to mention that also means couple of millions less for their download count.

Though, maybe their way of doing it or updates in makefiles help maintainers of distributions to put better builds. I guess that's what matters, not their own build on web page.

Re:What about distributions

[kvvbassboy]

Yes. But, on Ubuntu, and I am sure on Arch at least, it is easy enough to point your sources to the nightly build.

Re:What about distributions

[kripkenstein]

Though, maybe their way of doing it or updates in makefiles help maintainers of distributions to put better builds. I guess that's what matters, not their own build on web page.

Exactly, yeah. Most Linux users probably get Firefox through their distro, but the effort and patches that got this improvement done, will allow distros to compile in the same way and get the same speedup. If everything goes right, distros should be able to compile with these options and things will just work.

Re:What about distributions

[BZ]

If everything goes right, yes.

On the other hand, distros are known to purposefully compile with options that make the resulting build slower for various "system integration" reasons. So I'm not holding my breath on them doing the right thing here..

Re:What about distributions

[luserSPAZ]

Conveniently Mike is also the Debian Firefox package maintainer, so I'd expect him to apply as much of his work as possible to those packages. That's not to say that Debian's Firefox builds will be as fast as the official Mozilla builds, since Debian has other priorities that may conflict.

where are the builds?

[gongyiliao]

Such kind of news will be taken serious only when there are something real can be run and tested.

Re:where are the builds?

[RebelWebmaster]

Same place as always: http://nightly.mozilla.org/

Re:where are the builds?

[gongyiliao]

Thanks! I find that Ubuntu's PPA provides a repository for firefox-trunk

Both faster AND less sluggish?

[thisisauniqueid]

Wow.

Re:Both faster AND less sluggish?

[kervin]

faster => Increased speed

sluggish => Less latency

Re:Both faster AND less sluggish?

[thisisauniqueid]

No, in a UI-based program that reacts to a user's actions or its own internal timers in an event loop, everything speed-related has to do with the turnaround time between an event firing (a user click, a URL being entered, or a JS timer going off) and the result of that event being displayed to the user -- i.e. latency. So latency is really just the inverse of "bandwidth" or "speed" as you put it, within the UI paradigm.
faster => decreased latency.
sluggish => decreased latency.

Re:Both faster AND less sluggish?

[thisisauniqueid]

Typo: less sluggish => decreased latency.

Re:Both faster AND less sluggish?

[kasperd]

I don't believe it either. Compiler optimizations can make the browser faster, but it won't make it any less sluggish.

To me the browser feels sluggish when operations randomly take much longer than usual. This can be due to memory usage and swapping. But I have found on my newest laptop I have enough memory that this doesn't become a problem, and rather the browser will occasionally hang for seconds, and maybe even a minute, just burning CPU cycles. To make it stop being sluggish in those cases, it is not enough to cut CPU usage by a constant factor. You have to improve the algorithms to lower the worst case complexity.

Another problem is that when flash crashes (which it does frequently), firefox will hang waiting for it to be completely dead. This shouldn't happen. Firefox should just go on responding to the user and everything not directly related to flash should keep working while flash can go astray on its own in the background.

Re:Both faster AND less sluggish?

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox is faster then Opera when rendering a web page. I.e. it need less time to download and fully render a web-page.

Firefox is more sluggish when viewing a web page then Opera. I.e. it need more time to present to the user a web-page that she can use. The default configuration is that Firefox will not view a page until most of it is downloaded from internet, you can make Firefox display a partially rendered web-page, but then reading and using that web page would be like playing whack-a-mole (and links and scrolling won't work), it also make full rendering time much, much slower. Opera quickly displays a partially rendered web-page where not everything move around (and where links and scrolling works) as the rest of the page is downloaded from internet and rendered. (Opera displayed a useful page faster in older versions, but the newer versions have been more optimised on full rendering time (and browser benchmarks) and display pages slower. But newer versions of Opera still display usable web-pages faster then Firefox.)

Re:Both faster AND less sluggish?

[FooBarWidget]

Not necessarily. Operations may be offloaded in a thread so that the UI stays responsive even if the offloaded operation is slower than it was. Or if the operation yields the UI main loop periodically so that the UI stays responsive even though the operation now takes more time than it used to.

Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[xiando]

Install FF 4, browse a while, close all but one _blank_ tab and guess what? Firefox uses 7-800 MB _active_ memory. Doing what? Who knows. And it becomes slow and unresponsive after using it a while. Again, close all tabs but one - and it's STILL slow and crappy. The only way to make it "ok" again is to close it and start it up again. This is on Linux. FF4 is imho the worst ever, and they are talking about FF5 and 6 now... how about making a working FF4 first? maby ff4.1, ff4.2, etc. FF3 didn't become anything near accepable until 3.5/3.6.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't you heard? Firefox 5 is 4.1, and 6 is 4.2, 7 will be 4.3, and at last, their version numbers will be almost as high as IE or Chrome's.

Yea, it's pretty stupid...

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

It uses 208 megs here.

If I do the same with IE7 it uses 200 megs. That 8 meg makes such a difference on my 2 gig PC...

Or not.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[kripkenstein]

Install FF 4, browse a while, close all but one _blank_ tab and guess what? Firefox uses 7-800 MB _active_ memory.

Hi, I'm a Firefox dev. That sounds very bad. Can you please give some more details about how to reproduce it: Are you using a new profile? Are there any addons and plugins installed? What websites do you visit? And what specific Linux distro are you on?

Note that this might not be a bug: For example, if you visit a website that shows 200MB of images, then close that tab, then the memory is not necessarily freed. The reason is that the page stays cached, so that if you do 'History->Recently closed tabs' and open it, it will appear quickly. On a machine with lots of memory (most these days), that behavior tends to work better than releasing pages aggressively. However, if you aren't visiting websites with extreme memory use like that, then this might be an actual bug.

Getting back to your problem: With a new profile and no addons or plugins, we are unaware of a bug that causes anything like that. So I would be very grateful to you if you can point us to a bug we don't know about, so that we can fix it. If you give me steps that I can use to reproduce the problem (on my Linux machine over here),then you have my promise that I will l personally look into this and do everything in my power to fix it.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[inode_buddha]

News to me. *My entire machine* only has 512 megs of RAM. Not by choice, I'll get some more when I have the money.

And yet FF4 does just fine. So does OpenOffice, for that matter.

And so did all the previous versions for like the last 3 years.

And no, I'm not making this up, nor am I trolling. So really I just dunno why people are having probs with the memory, etc. My swap is 128 megs, but I hardly even use it. My current distro is slackware-13.37 with GNOME .

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[supersloshy]

Please mod this man up. These trolls need to be put to rest; if a bug as severe as that one actually existed, it would have been fixed a long time ago.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah. GP just likes to bash. And submitting a bug could mean it could get fixed, making his bashing much less credible in the future. We can't have that! ;)

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

what website uses 200MB worth of pictures besides (maybe) google maps? I'm running windows 7 on this machine atm, but right now I have slashdot, wikipedia and google open in 3 tabs. normally I run with other plugins, but this is a fresh install of windows so I haven't had time to install any yet. this is straight up firefox 4. in the last 10 minutes the browser has gone from 178MB (private working set) to 223MB. it's just sitting here. as far as I can tell, no scripts are running.

this bug has been around a long time.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Psychotria]

Thanks for the valuable feedback to the OP. Comments like this keep me coming back to Slashdot.

Out of curiosity, is there an option to turn on aggressive releasing of pages? It seems to me to be a good idea, but without being familiar (even remotely) with the source code and design perhaps there are reasons against this (if there is indeed no option to turn it on/off).

Cheers

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[kripkenstein]

Thanks for the valuable feedback to the OP. Comments like this keep me coming back to Slashdot.

Out of curiosity, is there an option to turn on aggressive releasing of pages? It seems to me to be a good idea, but without being familiar (even remotely) with the source code and design perhaps there are reasons against this (if there is indeed no option to turn it on/off).

Cheers

You can simply tell Firefox to not cache anything by setting browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to 0 in about:config. Then once you browse away from a page, it's memory will all be released. More details here

The problem with this is that pressing 'back' will mean a complete reload of the page you just left. At least in my experience, caching pages is almost always worth it (unless you have machine with very limited RAM).

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[kripkenstein]

That sounds normal to me - going from 178MB to 223MB isn't unexpected. You probably have several pages cached, each taking a few MB. That, and things like the JS heap 'settle' on a slightly higher amount of RAM soon after load (and stay there), as they keep allocated pages held to not waste time reallocating them later. There is also some effect of memory fragmentation (which makes more memory appear to be allocated than has been).

An interesting comparison would be, to load those exact pages in Firefox and a few other browsers. They will probably show similar memory behavior, but if they don't, please let me know!

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

My main system is a P4 with 2 GB of RAM so I get pretty OCD about memory. (Conky is one of my best friends.) Can't say I've ever seen FF chew up that much memory except for some rare Flash movie situations. I have noticed FF4 uses a bit more memory but nothing I worry about. So 7-800 MB? I smell a troll.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[bananaquackmoo]

For example, if you visit a website that shows 200MB of images, then close that tab, then the memory is not necessarily freed. The reason is that the page stays cached, so that if you do 'History->Recently closed tabs' and open it, it will appear quickly.

Which is clearly a problem. How does anyone think that is good design? What do I care if a page loads a second quicker via cache when MY ENTIRE SYSTEM is slowed down by the unnecessary caching?

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[hedwards]

I'm glad you're weighing in. I see these reports from time to time, and even today when I was sure that the memory being used by Firefox was going to be some ridiculous number, it ended up being 253mb. I'm always curious when people claim that their install has some sort of massive memory leak.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[kripkenstein]

If you prefer to change that behavior, it's easy to do - change browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers in about:config to 0. Then it won't cache pages. You will have slower loading of pages when you press back, restore recently closed tabs, etc., but if you would rather save that memory then that's cool.

In my personal experience, and also in surveys of Firefox users, the caching is almost always a good thing - it does not lead to any system slowdown, and does speed up the responsiveness of the browser. But that doesn't mean it's what everyone wants, and maybe your browsing habits are in a way that caching isn't a good idea - so the caching is configurable.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Flammon]

Interesting... I thought this was normal. 7-800 MB would be nice. I usually close it down when it hits 1.6 to 1.7 GB. I'm almost there now as you can see -> http://i.imgur.com/WRCRG.png. It gets very sluggish even on my new 64bit hexacore system, 8 Gig RAM, SSD. It could be a plugin or addon but I'm not running anything too crazy. How can I determine if it is an addon or a plugin? I'd be glad to provide all the profiling information that you need. Here are the addons that I'm running http://i.imgur.com/ieyFD.png, and the plugins http://i.imgur.com/ZT9EV.png. Do you see anything out of the ordinary? Maybe this will help -> http://i.imgur.com/qliRW.png. I have an abnormally high number of tabs open as I write this message, 34. I normally have about a dozen open and still the memory usage will grow to almost 2 GB before it get so slow that I can't stand it anymore and close it down. I find myself using Google Chrome more and more because it doesn't suffer from this problem. Firefox is still my favourite browser but this speed problem is making it difficult to use and as a web app developer, I can't have my browser hold me up like this. I really hope that this can be fixed.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[fdawg]

I can attest to the same behavior. My default page is www.google.com/ig which aggregates a bunch of RSS feeds. Next I open a tab to Gmail, Engadget, Gizmodo, NY Times, and The Consumerist. I leave these tabs open. I then open a new window to my company's bugzilla (which is the default installation of bugzilla, the version escapes me, but I can get the version on monday if it's of importance), open maybe a half dozen bugs in different tabs, editing bugs as the day goes on, then flip back to the original window to see what i missed on each tab.

In this state, 2 windows, lots of tabs each, moderate refreshing as the day goes on, I have yet to last greater than 48hrs without FF dying taking both windows and all tabs with it.

It's the default install of FF with 64bit Ubuntu 10.4 with the Adblock and Adobe Flash plugins as of about 6 months ago. It's an 4 core i7 with 12gigs of ram. As you've mentioned, in this kind of usage, FF caches up to about a gig and eventually the kernel pages the cache out. Naturally when I switch contexts back to FF, things churn for a while which is highly inconvenient.

I've switched to Chrome since and have not seen anything remotely similar- things stay open for weeks sans restarts for updates. (This is not a dig. FF is wonderful when it works. Chrome simply provides the level of stability I can live with.)

Thanks for taking the time. I can give you more details on monday if it would help.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[kripkenstein]

AdBlock and Firebug are both know to cause memory problems in some cases. I believe this will, at least in part, be fixed in Firefox 4.0.1 - which was launched the other day I think (maybe you already updated to it). But even so, they are good first suspects. Firefox lets addons modify a lot of internal things, which makes useful addons like AdBlock and Firebug possible, but also gives them the opportunity to (easily) create memory leaks.

In general, though, my best suggestion would be to see how things are without *any* plugins or addons. Simplest way is to create a new profile, and disable plugins and addons in it. Then browse for a while and see how things are. Odds are, you won't see strange memory behavior, and then the question is, which addon or plugin it is, and you can reenable them one by one til you find the guilty one.

Long-term, most addons will probably become Jetpack addons, which is a model similar to Chrome's. That kind of addon is more limited in what it can do, but also unable to cause memory leaks. Aside from that, we are moving to a one process per tab model, also like Chrome, will will help narrow down which page is responsible for large amounts of memory being used, when that happens. In the short term, though, problems like yours are almost always caused by addons or plugins, and I apologize for the hassle, the best thing to do is to find which it is, as I said earlier.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[kripkenstein]

The websites and behavior sound pretty normal to me. So I would suspect AdBlock (which is known to cause leaks in some cases, at least one issue is fixed in Firefox 4.0.1 IIRC), possibly also Flash. I would try disabling them both for a few days and see how that changes things. If the problem remains, I would try a new profile. If the problem still remains after that, then it should be reproducible at that point, maybe we can get more specific with the details (which sites, # of refreshes, etc.), and I'll try to reproduce here.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[westyvw]

I dont get it. I am on Linux with FF4. I have 15 tabs open, only using 197 megs. Do you have plugins running? I only use 3: Flashblock, Adblock, and Craigslist Imager.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[R.Mo_Robert]

After you close all those tabs, to a Ctrl+Shift+T (or a History | Recently Closed Tabs and restore your last closed tab). Notice that the entire page did not get re-loaded, as it was still cached in memory. Try this for a few more tabs, and you'll see where most of your RAM is going. That's also part of the reason that restarting the browser will help.

If this genuinely bothers you, change the value of browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo in about:config. The default is 10. If you can live with it (i.e., if you have the memory to support it), this is really not a problem, and I think it contributes to a better overall experience. When people look at how much memory Firefox is using, this is usually the "problem." If not, perhaps you've found a bug.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the op guy, but I've gotten this behavior... unfortunately I've always assumed it was one of my dozen addons... most of which are unused at any given time. It may be a different case...but I strongly suspect the leak is related to the flash plugin/sandboxing architecture as that's the only thing in common among all of my systems other than the adblocking... and even then one of them has nothing by way of adblock and just filters everything through privacy and a special nameserver--but while I run flash on that machine, it gets treated...specially.

adblock plus, all in one gestures, better privacy, certificate patrol, firegpg, ghostery, greasemonkey (usually turned off), https everywhere, mailcatch, noscript, oldlocation bar, switchproxy, trackmenot, ubuntu firefox pack, web developer...

What I can say though is that on the five or six computers I run, if I listen to pandora for a day or two on one of them, firefox inevitably grows in size until it consumes 25% of my system memory and will not free it up no matter how many tabs are closed.

I'm pretty lazy about things, so I've been known to tunnel my flash audio through pulse server to a remote machine and not restart firefox so music goes to ... wherever i happen to be... not sure how much the flask sandboxing would like the latency in that.

based on this, I wouldn't be at all surprised if even a new profile running the flash extension could hose itself with all the little tiny profile tracking applets that litter the web.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

Please mod this man up. These trolls need to be put to rest; if a bug as severe as that one actually existed, it would have been fixed a long time ago.

I wish! I've used Firefox for years and it leaks memory at the rate of about 2-300MB/day no matter what I do. Closing tabs actually increases its memory usage!

Firefox 4 improved on this... by compiling Firefox with Large Address Awareness, allowing it to use up to 4GB on Windows 7 64-bit. So instead of crashing at 2GB memory usage due to address space exhaustion, it crashes at 4GB instead. In practice this lets it last 3-4 times longer before crashing. The separation of Flash into a separate process helps too, since it allows Firefox itself to use more memory before it dies outright.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

Install FF 4, browse a while, close all but one _blank_ tab and guess what? Firefox uses 7-800 MB _active_ memory.

Hi, I'm a Firefox dev. That sounds very bad. Can you please give some more details about how to reproduce it: Are you using a new profile? Are there any addons and plugins installed? What websites do you visit? And what specific Linux distro are you on?

How to reproduce??!!

1) Install FF4.
2) Run it.
3) Witness what xiando is talking about.

I agree, FF4 is a huge hog, way more than 3.x. I was a FF faithful until 4 came out, and it just started sucking too much memory, swapping to disk after being idle, and really not impressing me.

Now I'm running Chrome (and I'm pleasantly pleased). But I would like to be a FF faithful again, but it was too painful. On Mac, Linux and Windows. Sorry.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Flammon]

I can turn off AdBlock but not Firebug, I'm in it all day and need it for development. It would be ironic to see a tool like Firebug be the cause of this problem. Firebug is also only running in a single tab, the app that I'm working on and that's it. So I'll play around with the addons but isn't there a way to see how much memory each addon is using instead going through a trial and error routine?

I just closed my browser and restarted it with the same 34 tabs and memory usage went down to 384 MB from 1.3 GB. By the time I finished writing this first part, which is the only thing that I've done other than visit http://support.mozilla.com/nl/questions/799397#answer-159664, and memory usage now sits at around 812MB. I did no development, did not use Firebug and didn't visit a page that has any ads except for this one. Now it's at 932MB and then all of a sudden drops back down to 731MB. The only thing that I'm doing is typing in this comment box on Slashdot. It's slowly climbing again and it's now at 981MB. It's climbing at a rate of about 2MB per second and then will drop about 200MB and then start climbing again. Like I said, I'm not browsing at all - just typing in this box while these memory fluctuations are happening.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

Would "profile rot" really cause something like this? My profile dates back to 2009 and I also have a long history of memory problems with slowdown (My record is ~2.5GB of (private bytes) RAM usage on a machine with 4GB total, to the point where it was driving other stuff to the pagefile.) on Firefox. I use a lot of tabs (About 70 open at a time on average.) But even then restarting the browser cuts that memory usage in about 50%.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[kripkenstein]

If you see that, then you might have plugins or addons installed systemwide (for example, Skype installs such plugins, and many others). Please try to disable or uninstall all plugins and addons, they might cause such problems. For myself, I do those 3 steps you mention every day, both as a normal user of Firefox and as a developer. I have not seen anything similar. If I did, it would be my #1 priority bug to fix.

In any case, if you are pleased with Chrome, then I'm happy you found a browser that works for you. The whole point of the web is to have multiple compatible clients, that users can pick from - so pick the one you like best.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[kripkenstein]

I suspect that a profile can, in very rare cases, cause this. We save a lot of stuff in the profile, which is useful, but also complicated - there are likely some rare corner cases that hit a very small number of people.

It's simple to find out if this is your issue: Create a new profile, browse with that for a few days, see how it feels. Also worth doing is disabling addons and plugins in the new profile.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[kripkenstein]

If you see memory usage change that quickly - 2MB per second! - then this should be easy to figure out. Disable Firebug for a few minutes and see if that fixes it. If not, then try closing page by page, until you see that the constant 2MB increases stops. Slowly disable and close stuff, until you are left with just a window with Slashdot and nothing else - no addons or plugins even. Then close Slashdot ;) by browsing to about:blank. If you still get 2MB increases every second, that is bizarre.

I would expect that disabling Firebug, or closing one of the web pages you have, will fix the problem. Since you have such a quick memory increase, it should be fairly easy to find out.

About addons: There is no way to see directly how much memory an addon uses - it is tightly integrated with the core browser. Jetpack addons can do that, but something like Firebug will likely never be a Jetpack addon (it needs tight integration).

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a similar problem, but I use many extensions. Still, this didn't happen in the previous version, and I used the same extensions.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[bill_mcgonigle]

I hear this quite a bit, but isn't there a better way by now? Ditching one's profile is highly injurious for serious Internet users. I understand the short-term debugging value, but say a new profile fixes things. Then what?

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Flammon]

Ok, so I've disabled all plugins and addons and restarted the browser. I sat and waited a couple of minutes before clicking on anything and until the memory usage stabilized and it did at around 615MB. As soon as I started to write this message, the memory usage started to climb. It's now at 695MB since I started writing this. As I type, the memory goes up, almost as if each keystroke is making it go up, it's now 737MB! Remember, no plugins and no addons. I'll stop typing now to see what happens. 750MB. (1 minute passes without any typing) still 750 MB. Ok, I'll start tying now and sure enough 774MB! I have to stop typing, lol. This is really weird. I just did some editing and it's now 880MB. I wish you could see this. Maybe I should do a screencast because it's really that unbelievable and I really need to show that the addons and plugins have been disabled and the browser was restarted. Oh, I just switched tabs to double check that my addons and plugins were disabled and when I switched back to Slashdot I noticed memory is now 664MB. I'm not sure if it happened while I was on the addons page or when I came back. Anyway, weird behaviour. It's climbing again now. I'll switch to see what happens. We'll I switched and nothing happened, it's at 750MB now so that must have just been a coincidence. So the next thing is to start closing tabs but I can't do that right now because I'm working on stuff but I will try later. So, when I started typing this message, memory was at 615MB and now it's at 813MB.

I'm running Firefox 4.0.1 on Ubuntu 10.10 AMD64, Linux 2.6.38.4, AMD Phenom 1090T, 8GB RAM.

Ok, well, memory is now down to 621MB. It did that when I stopped typing and I was reading what I wrote, another coincidence maybe.

Thanks for your help and I appreciate everything that you do. The browser is fantastic otherwise and if this memory/performance issue can be resolved, I would be very grateful. I'm really looking forward to the new separate process model, it will greatly simplify memory leak troubleshooting. It's the feature that I'm most looking forward to.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[k8to]

True.

If only there was a way to get the operating system to intelligently keep data in memory if possible, but not in a constrained environment.

Oh wait, there is. It's called _files_.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox is constantly hammering the disk (~/.mozilla/), even when you turn off history caching and whatnot. This makes it slow on any system where $HOME is on slower media, for example corporate workstations that use NFS for homedirs, netbooks or other systems with rather slow flash disks - in general it's BAD BEHAVIOUR, it steals I/O from the system and the users. Firefox is just a effin web browser after all, typically people also want to use the computer for other tasks while browsing. On my eeePC, the difference in speed, responsiveness, memory usage etc. between Firefox 4 and Chromium 11 is so vast that one of them is close to useless and the other makes the computer just as responsive as my workstation. One of them also leaves enough resources so that youtube videos etc can be displayed as expected, while that's almost impossible with the other. Guess which one.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

The sound of crickets is deafening.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[goarilla]

what website uses 200MB worth of pictures besides (maybe) google maps?

Try some devianart contests, although now they have it split, it used to be that all the entrants were displayed on the same page with comments intermixed iirc.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[xtracto]

FWIW I made some tests the other day and discovered that Adblock Plus used between 50 and 70MB of Firefox Memory. You can try, loading Fx with AdblockPlus and noting the memory, then disable the extension and check the memory again. ABP is quite a memory hog. (This is with EasyList subscription, without any list the memory usage is low)

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

Cudos on actually replying here - but be serious. A webpage with _200_ mb of images? Are you kidding me?

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

This may surprise you, but the 8 GBytes of main memory on my box are not FF's private resource.
And neither are my two CPUs. Oh, and there is a reason I am not running on reboot-me-three-times-a-day Windows.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

I see one of the other posters mentioning that the guy ("Xiando") is a 'troll'. I just want to point out that this is not a troll, this is actual firefox behaviour that not only I, but many people can confirm. If it wasn't a real issue then why are there so many people complaining about this? On every article on Firefox there are always numerous people why point out that *they* are *still* having problems with firefox's memory use. If you do a quick google search for things like "firefox memory usage" there are hundreds of people complaining about this. There is even a page on mozilla's own wiki which deals with firefox's memory (ab)use, and ways to counteract it.

Building new features is nice, but I think listening to your users is important too. "Kripkenstein" points out that Firefox is using this memory as a cache, 'just in case you might want to re-open that long closed tab'. However this seems to go counter to many people's expectations (including my own). If I am closing all my tabs, why would I want them to remain in memory? I'm closing them with a reason: I want to free some memory. Thus there seems to be a mismatch between what firefox (developers) expect users to do (closing tabs and then re-opening those same tabs often), and what users expect from firefox (I closed a tab, therefor it should be gone (from memory)).
At this point it is worth pointing out that the caching behaviour seems to be more complex than just keeping a closed tab in memory. In my experience most of the tips listed on the aforementioned wiki-page do not seem to help at all. This seems to be confirmed on the wiki page it self where it lists the maximum amount of memory reclaimed as something on the order of 15-20mb for the two or three settings. On the total amount of memory firefox uses this equates to one or two extra tabs. Example: right now my firefox is using 536mb (+102mb flash) memory to display 18 tabs. This boils down to 29.8-35.4mb of memory per-page, which seems like a lot. Even in the best case if I were to restart firefox I would estimate it still uses >20mb (~22mb) per page.

Many people run linux on older, low-end hardware especially because of it's reputation as a low-resource, light-weight operating system. Firefox seems to be building on expectations that are vague or simply not true. For example your statement "On a machine with lots of memory (most these days)" is vague. What is a lot of memory? My laptop has 768Mb of memory. To me that seems like a lot. Yet in practice it means that I have to restart firefox once or twice per-day because my memory is 'full'. Even when it's not 'full', firefox is always eating half or more of my memory (even a freshly started firefox uses 300+mb of memory). Back in the day I had a pentium-1 desktop with 16Mb of memory. Yet it could run a complete operating system, a word-processor, and a game at the same time, and not feel sluggish! Today apparently one tab of firefox takes almost twice the amount of memory, and I don't think the average webpage offers the same (or even similar) amount of functionality in that space.
Recently firefox has started doing these 'user survey' type of things where you looked at what user interface elements people use most-often. Surely you can do something similar w.r.t. to firefox's memory use? Find out how much memory firefox actually uses on average? When do people restart firefox (presumably to free memory, why else?) How much memory do their machines actually have? How much of that memory is used by firefox and how much by other programs? Etc. There is a lot to be learned!

So please, I love firefox, I love it's open-ness, the add-ons, the customize-ability, and even many of the new(er) features (the awesomebar is, in fact, awesome), but I hate the memory waste! Even adding a hidden config option to enable 'reclaim memory on tab-close' would be much appreciated!

p.s.
Long time reader, first time poster (no account)

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[jesser]

It sounds like you're asking for an option like "Firefox, please pretend my computer only has 512MB of RAM" that affects all types of caches in Firefox. Or a slider that's like "Make Firefox as fast as possible [------|--] Leave as much RAM for other apps as possible". I don't think such a thing exists.

You can install RAMBack for a "clear all in-memory caches" button. In combination with about:memory, it can help you tell the difference between healthy caching behavior and memory leak bugs. Unfortunately, it skips sqlite-based caches, which are some of the largest.

You can disable Firefox's "Block reported attack sites" and "Block reported web forgeries" to save maybe 15MB of RAM. On the other hand, it's nice to have that extra defense against zero-day attacks.

You can disable Firefox's URL history to save maybe 35MB of RAM, but then you'll lose purple links and the awesomebar (unless you use bookmarks extensively). There used to be a way to tell Firefox to only keep a few weeks of URL history, but I can't find it now.

You can lower browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers from "8 if there's enough RAM" to 1 or 2. This controls how many navigated-away pages Firefox will keep in memory with their complete state (rather than just scroll position and form data). I'd advise against lowering it all the way to 0, because if you accidentally click a link or close a tab, restoring the page from bfcache is not only faster but also significantly less likely to lose page state (especially on AJAXy pages).

If you use session restore, you can instruct Firefox to only load restored tabs once you switch to them, by setting browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs to 0.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[jesser]

I'm pretty sure you want browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers, not browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

While I really applaud your postive attitude and willingness to fix things, it seems there are some caveats on things there are are debatebly (un)reasonable. If Firefox supports the importing of old profiles and use of add-ons, should it not be expected to perform correctly using features those (now many years old) features? I understand it can be hard to control the behavoir of an add on, but the profile thing seems (IMHO) an unreasonable expectation to place on a user. And ultimately, the user expects the browser to be the gatekeeper of such things, even add-ons. Are we wrong to ask for/expect that? It's always seemed a bit dismissive of the devs to push blame for memory leaks to imperfect and/or non-default setups (again, IMHO).

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

Too much cache is a form of memory leak.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[kripkenstein]

I agree this isn't a good solution - it's just a way to narrow down the problem.

If the profile does turn out to be the problem, then we can turn to investigate the profile itself, assuming the user is ok with that (by filing a bug and attaching the profile).

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[fat_mike]

Hi Firefox dev! When will it take less than 3 minutes for Firefox to actually load and render a website? Seriously, my computer boots faster than the time it takes Firefox to freaking open.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[gbutler69]

Nice response. I'm pretty sure this guy is trolling because I have nothing like that experience. I bounce back and forth between FF 4 (actually mindefield), Epiphany Webkit, and Chromium. They all prform similarly while FF is much more feature rich. Keep up the good work. Thanks for making the Web great!

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[gbutler69]

Typing in slashdot sucks in anyy browser in my experience. Ever since their latest round of updates it is obivious that they areo doing soe heavy and badly optimized JS sutff on every single keystroke. My guess is they are doing really inefficient queries oby class or somesuch using something like JQuery. It is a travesty.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[kripkenstein]

So please, I love firefox, I love it's open-ness, the add-ons, the customize-ability, and even many of the new(er) features (the awesomebar is, in fact, awesome), but I hate the memory waste! Even adding a hidden config option to enable 'reclaim memory on tab-close' would be much appreciated!

There is such an option: browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers :) Set it to 0, and pages are not cached anymore. See here for more details.

Many people run linux on older, low-end hardware especially because of it's reputation as a low-resource, light-weight operating system. Firefox seems to be building on expectations that are vague or simply not true.

We ship with a default behavior that we think and hope is good for most users. We do user surveys and so forth, to check if we are right, and I think we usually do pretty well (but nobody is perfect, obviously!). I definitely agree that users on low-end hardware have different needs for caching and so forth, and that's why Firefox lets you customize the caching behavior, as I mentioned earlier with that pref. You can also change how much memory is used for the disk and memory caches (search for browser.cache.disk and browser.cache.memory in about:config, to see the relevant options).

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[kripkenstein]

I am definitely not dismissing that! If an old profile causes buggy behavior, then that is a bug in Firefox, I fully agree.

The problem is practical, though - this happens on a very small number of user profiles, and users usually don't want to (for totally understandable reasons!) file a bug with their profile attached. So it is very, very hard for us Firefox devs to figure out the problem, since we can't debug it locally on our machines.

In the long term, we are doing a lot of work on about:memory, which right now shows some useful info, but we want it to show a lot more. Then users with too much memory being used will be able to report bugs with information that should help us a lot in figuring out the problem.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that this might not be a bug: For example, if you visit a website that shows 200MB of images, then close that tab, then the memory is not necessarily freed. The reason is that the page stays cached, so that if you do 'History->Recently closed tabs' and open it, it will appear quickly. On a machine with lots of memory (most these days), that behavior tends to work better than releasing pages aggressively. However, if you aren't visiting websites with extreme memory use like that, then this might be an actual bug.

Functionality that isn't used "every second of runtime" should not have an effect that ALL users feel 100% of the time, especially because "most machines these days" is in stark opposition to Firefox's official support of hardware made potentially 15 years ago for Windows 2000 with 256MB of RAM. Even Pentium 4's made for XP are excruciatingly slow with 4 times as much RAM; these are considered modern machines and still require support in corporate environments that FF is struggling to conquer. FF won't improve its PR if it assumes everyone upgrades often but claims to support PC's unprepared for the RAM requisites and demands of today's 200MB tabs. None of the other makers are that bad in spite of the same problem --FF alone appears doomed in a manner mindful of the sluggish Netscape from a decade ago. Why not have code that is more responsive to the environment and DO SOMETHING about holding back hogging on those machines?

Pretty simple solution then:
Ask the OS how much RAM is free and DON'T do stupid things seizing using up 100% if only 5% of the "recently closed" tabs have a chance of getting reached.
Another wrong mentality is that every time a person has an issue in an OSS configurable browser, the solution is asking what extension set is loaded. How about making FF 6 or 7 better able to restrict leakage?

In the real world outside Mozilla, forums refrain from implying that users of IE, Chrome and Safari are suffering from plugin choices. The fact that plugins variety is even a problem must then be Mozilla's design flaw. An OS is much larger than your browser project, and yet troubleshooters rarely ask troubled users what antivirus, theme settings, bitdepth and hardware config they have. Asking 1000 FF bug reporters extension questions for 1 single problem that never gets permanently addressed is not going to help your retention rate; though I commend you for providing a helping hand. GP represents a large amount of /. user's problems and his problem is better left to the FF forums, rather than the current discussion.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[kripkenstein]

So the next thing is to start closing tabs but I can't do that right now because I'm working on stuff but I will try later.

I would definitely suspect that one of your tabs is guilty here, if you have no addons or plugins enabled. Hopefully if you try that later, you'll find which is responsible.

If not, and you still see this with a single tab, new profile, no addons or plugins, then that is... extremely interesting. At that point, a screencast would be the perfect thing here, good idea! Would be great if you can do that, and if so, please include the following in the screencast:

• Show how you create a new profile and use that
• Show Help->About Firefox to make sure we see the version number
• Show about:buildconfig too (shows the specific build info for your local copy)
• Show that no plugins or addons are enabled
• Show two windows, one showing memory, and the other Firefox, and do some typing to show the problem you describe

The behavior you describe should definitely not be happening. Hopefully this can help narrow it down.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Xtravar]

I really don't care how much memory it uses, so long as it's fast. The only reason I can fathom being a memory bean counter would be if you have an older computer or netbook or whatnot.

This new nightly linux is pretty kickass.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

According to about:cache, firefox's memory cache is limited to 32mb. So where is that "200MB of images" being cached?

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[kripkenstein]

How about making FF 6 or 7 better able to restrict leakage?

We are working very hard on that, from various directions - from better tools to report how much memory is being used, to eventually running tabs in separate processes so their memory use can be contained, and also allowing Jetpack plugins that are likewise separated so they cannot cause leaks.

The fact that plugins variety is even a problem must then be Mozilla's design flaw.

There is definitely a tradeoff here - Firefox is more customizable and flexible than other browsers. That makes it more vulnerable to leaks from addons and so forth. In other words, it is much easier to prevent these problems when you greatly restrict what your browser and its addons do.

As I said above, we are working on some technical improvements for these matters, which should hopefully be available later this year. The tradeoff should improve at that point.

Meanwhile, it is possible to use Firefox's customization to change the behavior, if you want - stop if from caching pages and so forth.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[kripkenstein]

The memory cache caches some types of items, but not images, in that way. Take a look at about:cache to see more details of what it currently stores, if you want.

For images, the important cache is probably the page cache (bfcache), which stores entire pages so they can quickly be reloaded. You can change the amount of pages it caches with browser.sessionstore.max_total_viewers (set it to 0 to not cache any, for example).

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, here goes. Memory is at 87.9MB when I started typing. Now Check it out. 95MB already I'm not sure what to say but maybe there a real problem with Slashdot here. I usually don't type this badly. I'm doing it on purpose to get the memory going. So now, I'm at the end of my comment and memory is sitting at around 144MB. I guess that should be considered very interesting! I'll post a link to the screencast in a minute.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Lennie]

"Doing what"

Maybe you could take a look at about:memory and post it on http://bugs.mozilla.org/

It could be they have something to say about it or could fix something, they are usually very responsive, but you have to report it.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, here goes. Starting att around 83MB. You'll see that as I type the memory usage is climbing at a crazy rate. What 100MB now! That's pretty amazing. Slashdot, what the heck are you doing to me? I wonder if this happens on other browsers as well. I'll have to check it out. So now we are at 134MB. Wild. I guess that if I continue typing here I'll eventually run out of memory. Ok, this is my third screencast. Hopefully it worked!

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Lennie]

I'm fairly certain that 200MB worth of pictures is 200MB wordt of uncompressed pictures.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Anonymous Coward]

> Can you please give some more details about how to reproduce it:

I'm not the person you are replying to, but here is one way for me with FF4 under Ubunu 11.04.

Go to mail.google.com and log into it. Keep the page open, but close your network connection (e.g disconnect wireless on your laptop to save power). Go away for a while. Next morning, Firefox4 will be using over 1.5 GB memory and the machine will be swapping its brains out.

Pretending there are no such bugs in FF when people have been complaining about the leaks for years is a rather poor reflection.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[kripkenstein]

> Can you please give some more details about how to reproduce it:

I'm not the person you are replying to, but here is one way for me with FF4 under Ubunu 11.04.

Go to mail.google.com and log into it. Keep the page open, but close your network connection (e.g disconnect wireless on your laptop to save power). Go away for a while. Next morning, Firefox4 will be using over 1.5 GB memory and the machine will be swapping its brains out.

Pretending there are no such bugs in FF when people have been complaining about the leaks for years is a rather poor reflection.

I never pretended there are no such bugs - I am sure there are. Thank you for giving some steps to reproduce, I will try this!

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Flammon]

Here's the unedited screencast. I had a small problem with the Compiz and xvidcap but everything that you requested is there. You should be able to reproduce.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64pX97-THXc

Thanks,

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[R.Mo_Robert]

I suppose they're both relevant, but browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo is, indeed, the one that controls what I was talking about (restoring the last few recently closed tabs from memory). The browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers preference may also help, but unlike the other one, it at least tries to detect an optimum value by default based on the amount of RAM you have. Additionally, it is the preference that stores pages to avoid having to reload when doing a back/forward, rather than the one that does what I was talking about.

(Why they are two different things, I don't know, other than that the former is also used if you enable the "restore session on restart" feature or whatever it's called.)

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[kripkenstein]

Thank you! I can reproduce this, and it definitely looks very bad...

I filed bug 654028, and as I promised before, I will investigate this myself. If you want, you can subscribe to the bug to get updates.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Flammon]

Wow, thanks so much for all the effort that you put into this. I subscribed to the bug and looking forward to see the cause. I might do another screencast because the one that I did was quick and dirty and turned out awful.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[supersloshy]

Whoever modded me up as funny must be trolling; I was dead serious! If Firefox really did have serious memory leaks it would have been fixed by now. Sometimes a plugin or add-on or something can cause memory problems and this should be pretty obvious. If you can't reproduce it with a fresh profile, please don't blame FF for it.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Have Brain Will Rent]

ou can simply tell Firefox to not cache anything by setting browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to 0 in about:config.

You know there is something about that sentence.... the part up to "anything" gives me the impression that there is going to be some switch to do with turning caching on and off... which in turn leads me to expect the switch to maybe have the word "cache" (or some variant) in its name... then I get to to the second half of the sentence where I find the switch name is very long but does not have "cache" in it anywhere.... There's probably a good reason for that but somewhere in my mind it rubs something the wrong way and the thing it is rubbing is labelled "why users find software difficult to use"...

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[luserSPAZ]

This is an advanced setting that we don't expect users to tweak. The default value should work for most people. Here's a decent test: if you have to go to about:config to change a setting, it's not something we want normal users to touch, so talking about usability at that point is a bit silly. The most usable software just does the right thing and doesn't require users to change setttings.

Re:Every improvement is highly needed, FF4 sux

[Have Brain Will Rent]

Well if it is something you don't want normal users to touch then saying "simply tell Firefox" probably isn't the best description of a solution. YMMV of course.

But whether it is a "normal" user or not, talking about usability is at that point is not silly - the setting is there for a reason and even if it is only for super duper uber advanced tech people, usability is still an issue. Naming things with the clearest possible labels relating to their purpose is about good usability and everybody benefits from good usability. In this case usability may translate into good maintainability but it is still good usability.

Having had to read lots and lots of other people's code I can tell you good choice of names is in fact a usability issue.

Profile guided?

[zippthorne]

Does that mean they weren't using a profiler before now??

That... actually explains quite a bit...

Re:Profile guided?

[shish]

I presume they had a human readable profiler before; but profile-guided optimisation is something different. TL:DR version, the compiler looks at the profiler stats, and optimises the code so that the most heavily used parts get priority

Re:Profile guided?

[cratermoon]

PGO: Profile-Guided Optimization. A FF PGO build will compile an executable with with profiling on, the run that executable using an automated script that drives the browser through a suite of tests that is intended to mimic typical usage. The results of this profiling are written to a file and then a second, optimized build is done using the profiling results as a guide for the optimizer to generate better code for the hotspots.

I've been doing it with FF4 on my Mac with Snow Leopard for some time. It does make for longish build times, though.

Re:Profile guided?

[kripkenstein]

Does that mean they weren't using a profiler before now?? That... actually explains quite a bit...

No, we use profilers ;) In fact we have some valgrind - the awesome Linux profiling tool - devs working here.

Profile guided optimization is something else though. It is a special way of compiling and linking, that the compiler and linker use profiling information to know how best to optimize the code. So code that is used a lot is compiled with -O3 (the most optimizations), while code that is not used a lot gets -Os (to take less space), and so forth. This is a very useful technique that was not available on Linux until last year, and the news today is that Firefox now builds properly with it and there is a nice noticeable speed improvement for Linux users.

Re:Profile guided?

[toetagger]

Too bad you didn't write the summary - this was actually the news! Thanks for your great posts here this morning.

Re:Profile guided?

[dotancohen]

So code that is used a lot is compiled with -O3 (the most optimizations), while code that is not used a lot gets -Os (to take less space), and so forth.

Other than space, what is the disadvantages of compiling the whole thing with -O3? I use a lot of esoteric features, as do my extensions I'm sure, and disk space cost is so low that cost really isn't a problem for another 10 or 100 MB. Even memory is cheap in many cases.

How much space is being saved by _not_ optimising the entire build?

Re:Profile guided?

[PatrickThomson]

I was always under the impression that -Os made sense in a lot of contexts because of the smaller binary size fitting into the CPU cache more easily and speeding up some kind of switching process that apparently happens a lot during execution and not just when you launch the program - but I'm obviously far from an expert on these matters.

Re:Profile guided?

[Anonymous Coward]

Under certain circumstances code that is optimized for size is faster than code optimized for speed, because it takes less memory in the cache. Part of profile guided optimization is to find those circumstances (and others that can't be determined from the source like what frequency non-annotated branches have).

Re:Profile guided?

[mhotchin]

-Os *is* an optimization. Memory fetches are slow. If the runtime of the code is not a critical factor, then it is best to get it in fast. Smaller code also leaves more room in the (small, extremely valuable) L1 cache.

Re:Profile guided?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not available until last year? What? I have been using these various optimizations for 5+ years on Gentoo.

Re:Profile guided?

[dotancohen]

I see, thanks.

Re:Profile guided?

[Anonymous Coward]

I never trust optimized code.

Re:Profile guided?

[KiloByte]

Actually, profile-guided optimisations tend to make speed WORSE. They just let you get a better balance between executable size and execution speed -- you will get some parts compiled with -O3 and some with -Os. You might just use -O3 for the whole program. The "speed gains" quoted are compared to -O2.

Re:Profile guided?

[zippthorne]

I was assuming that profile-guided meant that the profiling was used to guide programmers to look at parts of the code and maybe choose different algorithms, or make decisions that allow the whole algorithm to be implemented in executable code that fits entirely in cache, or storing pre-computed values somewhere, or whatever changes are indicated by figuring out where the bottlenecks are - In other words, using the profiler to figure out the best way to cheat.

Obviously, you can only gain so much without having an actual programmer in your optimization loop....

Re:Profile guided?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that mean they weren't using a profiler before now??

That... actually explains quite a bit...

No, we use profilers ;) In fact we have some valgrind - the awesome Linux profiling tool - devs working here.

Profile guided optimization is something else though. It is a special way of compiling and linking, that the compiler and linker use profiling information to know how best to optimize the code. So code that is used a lot is compiled with -O3 (the most optimizations), while code that is not used a lot gets -Os (to take less space), and so forth. This is a very useful technique that was not available on Linux until last year, and the news today is that Firefox now builds properly with it and there is a nice noticeable speed improvement for Linux users.

PGO builds have been available under Linux since 2008; until last year I used to compile PGO-builds on my ArchLinux netbook (AUR Package)

Re:Profile guided?

[kripkenstein]

I guess I remembered wrong then. Or perhaps it was only last year that a stable GCC came out with it? In any case, sorry for being wrong.

Kick up the ass is what Firefox needs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox got the web moving off IE6 but now facing competition from Chrome, Safari (default in the popular iOS devices) and Opera (which has it's market share niche in some countries). What Mozilla really needs to do is buy some cheap netbooks and force all its developers to test it on a slow processor. Or even get old early XP laptops with less than 512mb ram and really test it. If Firefox can get the reputation of being fast on older hardware (especially among IE6 hangouts with their aging corporate PCs) then it will be able to reclaim its falling market share from Chrome which is already the number 2 in many countries and 1 some such as Philippines, Tunisia and Serbia.

Link to original blog source

[Anonymous Coward]

Mike Hommey's original blog posting on Faster Linux builds.

Re:Link to original blog source

[Vectronic]

Which also happens to be at the end of this blog of blog, blog in the summary about the blog of blog.

That's odd.

[/dev/trash]

Firefox has always been the same speed for me in Linux and Windows. So now it's gonna be faster? Score.

Re:That's odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox has always been the same speed for me in Linux and Windows.

Funny, I remember it being a lot faster years ago when my computer had a tenth the MHz it has now.

Re:That's odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell yeah.

Re:how about making a working FF4 first?

[TaoPhoenix]

Sorry man, you fell for a really weird version of the Version Number Marketing. Except this time, you seem to be saying they don't deserve to put good features in the next version?! Firefox "5 and 6" ... ARE 4.1 and 4.2!

You're thinking of the long exhausting push to make FF4. But for X reasons, they chose to amp up the version numbering, as well as to drill out a couple of features.

Yes, "it took them too long", that's what we all spot Linux for, right? "Give us features, don't worry about polish" right?

Except that just might be changing.

Will this help Firefox for Android?

[Liambp]

I recently switched back to Firefox on my desktop and love it but when I tried Firefox for Android on my phone is was as slow as molasses. You can actually watch the page rendering in pixelated real time. Will the linux optimisations carry over I wonder?

Re:Will this help Firefox for Android?

[Anonymous Coward]

The differences between Android Linux and desktop GNU/Linux are so huge that it probably won't affect Android much or at all.

Re:Will this help Firefox for Android?

[allo]

firefox on android sucked the last time i tried it.
But the defaultbrowser is pretty much okay, if you want any more try opera for android. both are much better than firefox there.

Available now in Nightly, soon in Aurora

[kripkenstein]

However according to Hommey, these new faster and less sluggish builds of Firefox for Linux will be available only from Firefox 6 onwards and we expect the first beta of Firefox 6 to available only by September - October 2011.

Note that you do not need to wait, if you are ok with running a Nightly build. Nightly builds are the latest code, so they are obviously less stable. But you can get this improvement right now if you want it.

Otherwise, you can wait just a few weeks and Firefox 6 Aurora will be released, which is somewhat more stable, and will include this code. (6 weeks later will be a Beta, and 6 weeks after that, a stable release.)

cross posted

[bean.java]

from my post http://ask.slashdot.org/story/11/04/30/1720251/Ask-Slashdot-Best-Small-Footprint-Modern-Browser [....] .... i am currently running firefox 3.6.16 via untarring the linux installer into my home folder... i am running debian squeeze on a p4 3.0, 1g ram, it seems my 2gig swap partition isn't loaded/mounted, onboard video, and creative live sound card and have...80 tabs open(most of which being 4chan's /w/ Threads so there is lots of images)....plus BetterPrivacy, DownThemAll, FlashBlock, FlashGot, gTranslate, HTTPS-Everywhere, NoScript, Personas, Text to Voice Extensions running. Surely with Firefox 3.6.X series of browsers you should be able to do what you want to do on your current computer. Although it may be hard to find anymore.

Re:cross posted

[bean.java]

one reply i made to parent [...] i leave firefox open for a week(or so) at a time.... reload all tabs about once an hour(or so) and usually end up with 100+ tabs before i go through and clean them up(last time i did that had 120 tabs),, reason for cleaning is usually system slow-down..... my most common memory hog is plugin-container(watch 5 or 6 youtube videos between reload all tabs)..... but my point is..... Why does everyone say FF is leaky? the only winblows system in this house is a Win vista 2(aka win7...wtf?) and that one is always crashing and blaiming FF. The usual cause of the crash is actually the Windows Printer Substem crashing, but windows blaims FF cause FF called the WPS. So please stop blaiming FF just cause windows says it is FF. Also as an aside consider various Microsoft tools claim your system is secure but other installed tools say you got 20 different viruses, malwares, etc. side note....fsck it it won't let me use paragraphs the posting feature just crushes everything together

Re:cross posted

[fast turtle]

I'm using FF 4.0 and since the system is connected to an APC-UPS with 30+ mins runtime, I haven't shut it down for the last 17 days. Currently I'm using 28 tabs, Noscript, Down Them All and Better privacy and total memory footprint is a meager 420K according to Task Manager in Win7.

Look - it's a poster from 1996!

[dbIII]

There is this video card called the "Voodoo" which has decent 3D acceleration on linux and there is also one called the "Matrox Millenium". I've got no idea how you managed to get hold of Firefox in 1996 or managed to get your posts on Slashdot to us in 2011 but please stop bothering us here in the future about problems already solved back in your time.
Also sorry to disappoint you, but we don't have flying cars yet.

Re:Look - it's a poster from 1996!

[Osgeld]

the Millennium sucked, I still have one ... somewhere

I thought it was the other way around

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the whole point of http://www.palemoon.org/ supposed to be Windows builds of Firefox with more optimized compiler options on par with what you would get from building it out of a Linux distro's repository? Granted, they also remove a few lesser used features (parental controls, some bits of activex support, accessibility options) to squeeze out a bit more speed.

The proof is in the pudding...

[Anne Honime]

Just tried the nightly, and there's definitively a perceived speed boost. I can't compare to windows version, but it's there on linux for sure. Easy as downloading the nightly to a local dir in your home, unpack and run. Better, some odd layout bugs of the stable seem to have disappeared too.

you call that fast?

[bananaquackmoo]

Calling it as fast as the Windows version is not calling it fast at all. In fact, compared to Chrome or Opera on Windows, its calling it slow.

It'll take more than just a speedup

[Just Brew It!]

I was a Mozilla/Firefox (and Netscape before that) user for many, many years... going all the way back to Netscape 3.01. I finally jumped to Chrome about a year ago, when the sluggishness of Firefox on Linux really started to piss me off. I've found that I really like Chrome's streamlined, minimalist approach; and IMO the recent addition of native PDF rendering capability is another feather in Chrome's cap. Even if Firefox manages to match Chrome's speed, that's not likely to get me to switch back...

Mozilla overlook it for long time

[unixbhaskar]

It was one of my desire and complaint to Mozilla for long time .I have been using firefox for eternity! and always found it sluggish on variant of GNU/Linux distros( I run five at this moment i.e Gentoo, Arch,Fedora,Debian and Suse). Thanks god at last some common sense prevail in the mozilla camp, they were doing lot of unnecessary thing adding here and there but missing the actual clog . Keep up the good work guys. Cheers! Bhaskar

Today,

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox has ceased being That Thing Ubuntu Users Open Once to Install Google Chrome.. well, maybe. We'll see. It certainly has a shot now, I think.

Nope! Its all hardware acceleration

[Billly Gates]

Give me a break.

Chrome remains superior on Linux if you have 3D effects enabled because of hardware acceleration. ... assuming you only have an Nvidia card. ATI and Intel still are not accelerated.

Firefox uses DirectX and Direct3d which was a bad choice. Or maybe no choice at all was available on other platforms? OpenGL really is not designed for high definition video and 2d text acceleration.

Flash still is not fully accelerated either.

Re:Nope! Its all hardware acceleration

[shutdown -p now]

Profile-guided optimization is actually a very useful tool - it can easily net you 10-15% extra perf, if the profiling data is good (on MSVC, which had this for some time now; I assume that the new implementation in g++ is just as good). It's essentially an attempt to approximate what JIT-compilers for Java and the likes do with AOT compilation of native code.

Re:Nope! Its all hardware acceleration

[BZ]

OpenGL and Direct3D are pretty equivalent APs in terms of capabilities. Firefox uses OpenGL on Mac. It tried to use OpenGL on Linux, but discovered that this causes some drivers to crash. In fact, even detecting the driver type causes it to crash. The problem has since been solved by just using a separate process at startup to detect the driver type so crashy drivers can be blacklisted, so OpenGL should be used in on Linux in the future.

Direct2D (which is what does 2d stuff on Windows) is something that has no equivalent on Mac and Linux. Render can sometimes do an almost-equivalent job if you get lucky with your card and drivers (e.g. a lot of the IE "hardware acceleration" tests are way faster on Linux than on Mac when you get lucky in this way). To deal with this issue Mozilla is basically going to implement a cross-platform accelerated 2d graphics layer (on top of OpenGL in the Linux case) and use that. See http://blog.mozilla.com/joe/2011/04/26/introducing-the-azure-project/

But yes, this would all work better on Linux if the drivers worked without crashing, if there were a decent system 2d API for accelerated graphics, etc...

Mozilla Launches Firefox 4 for Android last Friday

[operator_error]

Have you tried FireFox 4 for mobile, which runs on both Android and Maemo? It was actually released Friday.

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/03/29/mozilla-launches-firefox-4-for-android-allowing-users-to-take-the-power-and-customization-of-firefox-everywhere-2/

Re:Mozilla Launches Firefox 4 for Android last Fri

[operator_error]

Oops, I should have written Firefox 4 for mobiles was released March 29th.

Big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

So they did what I was able to do long, long ago with simple -march=native -O2 CFLAGS?

The difference in my build where I only did that over theirs was a huge improvement.

i can cause a run away memory leak

[cheekyboy]

Its easy to cause a memory leak.

get jquery and jqplot, replot() a graph over and over, and it will leak to 3gig ram!!

Chrome wont leak, same JS code.

Unless Mozilla pays me 20 free bluray movies, i wont both emailing them.

Re:i can cause a run away memory leak

[fbartho]

Hahahaha! That's cute. Do you know if it's a Mozilla-only JS engine bug? I see the reverse on embedded browsers. V8 will segfault (not just leak memory!) with valid JS code that works fine in FF or WebKit (ios, Safari, or Chrome)

There are other reasons I don't personally like jQuery, but this anecdote adds to that body of mistrust.

Its annoying

[Anonymous Coward]

They build firefox plug container with path to /usr/bin/lib/gcc hardcoaded. So if you have your latest GCC installed anywhere else in the system, you are toast. With the whole firefox going to 4.5.1, I guess I will have to stick with older versions, since the developers will hard code gcc paths into the code. God knows what sort of developers are writing open source code nowadays/

FF needs its own micro linux kernel

[cheekyboy]

hahaha, sounds like FF needs its own user space micro kernel, mini linux with no drivers, the ones embedded devices like modems use.

Then the whole FF can be inside a a user level process that has its own VM/processes/threads etc... mini linux you can ssh to.

Dumb idea? not really... its one way to code for 'linux only' and make it run on any OS.

Re:FF needs its own micro linux kernel

[Fri13]

Erh.... Microkernels does not exist in user space but in kernel space (Yes, there is at least Microsoft project where there is no more kernel space/user space separation whole software system exist at same call space).
And Linux kernel is still monolithic what means Linux kernel is still a whole operating system. Would it run just a firefox or not, it does not change technicality in Linux.

And you can already get a such what you suggest. Motherboard manufacturers already use such combinations. Linux + Firefox. (Yes there are some other middleware softwares as well).

Around optimization... Never relax...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather have correct software over "optimized" software.

FF4 lasted 3 days on my machine

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope TaoPhoenix logs a bug report because FF4 is just like he says: bloated and unresponsive. I found it unusable and went back to 3.6.

I wasn't using any sites with big images, but I did use AdblockPlus and TabMixPlus. Probably FireBug too. So, nothing particularly unusual.

FF4 just bloats up really fast (over 1GB of RAM for a few tabs, WTF are you DOING with all that RAM????) and is really laggy even if you close almost all windows. PS I use FreeBSD 8.2 and built FF4 from ports.

Re:FF4 lasted 3 days on my machine

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah! It was xiando, not TaoPhoenix I intended to refer to. Damn my bad eyes!

Minor correction

[tqft]

PGO did work on linux for a while a few years back but stopped when some code changes to the FF core borked PGO on linux (?jsctypes? was one thing maybe). - actually gcc 4.? didn't cope. We have then had to wait for a compiler upgrade to make it work again.

Yes I am subscribed to the bugs.

And thanks for working on this.

Failure!

[Anonymous Coward]

After all these years, as fast as Windows?
What a failure.

Faster Firefox on Lubuntu ..

[doperative]

I find Firefox running on Lubuntu from a USB device runs faster than Windows on the same hardware ...

Flash is (still) the real problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I can just imagine what Flash on Linux is compiled with.

what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its already faster in linux than windows at least for me. it loads about twice as fastin lunux. I'm on a fresh install in xp too.

not needed

[Randle_Revar]

It doesn't need to be faster, it already plenty fast - I never notice a difference in speed from Windows to Linux. And of course the Linux version is far more stable than the Windows version.

Linux distro

[Zoxed]

I would guess that most Linux users are using the build provided by their distro.
Perhaps posters here could specify their distro when posting good/bad reports.
Single datapoint: my Firefox build on Gentoo works fine !

good stuff

[apexwm]

That's great news. Just a clear demonstration of how open source and Firefox make IE look even worse these days.

Looking Forward to Firefox-Qt

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking Forward to Firefox-Qt

This has no meaning

[peawormsworth]

I like Firefox. But this sort of article makes me worry about its future value.

Any time a salesman tries to explain the manufacturing technique or space aged materials used... I know that the product is almost certainly overpriced or deficient in comparison to competing products. I really dont care how beautiful the code is or how well it compiles with whatever exotic options. Contact me when you have real comparison tests for speed and a version to download.