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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)."
The optimisations will be enabled in Firefox 6... is that the version that comes out this week or the week after?
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! :)
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Microsoft Internet Explorer is clearly superior in every way.
From TFA:
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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...
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.
You may now gaze upon my greatness.
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.
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.
Gravity Sucks
Linux does not suck at 3d proprietary drivers suck at 3d.
Such kind of news will be taken serious only when there are something real can be run and tested.
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?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Wow.
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
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.
Does that mean they weren't using a profiler before now??
That... actually explains quite a bit...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
Mike Hommey's original blog posting on Faster Linux builds.
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.
Gravity Sucks
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.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
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.
Says the Mac fanboy, where FF isn't optimized either.
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Firefox has always been the same speed for me in Linux and Windows. So now it's gonna be faster? Score.
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.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I don't know why, but I don't experience these problems. Perhaps I don't have enough Greasemonkey scripts. /tmp/, which has been mounted to a tmpfs(ram-backed fiesystem). /much/ memory as they can, so I get better performance. /not/ use it?
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
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
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
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?
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...
It's worth looking again: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nouveau_2639_flip&num=1
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.)
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.
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.
The reason we subjugate ourselves to law is to better procure justice. If law does not accomplish this purpose then it m
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.
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
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
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
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.
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.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Then it's good that Firefox uses less memory than other browsers.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
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.
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.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
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.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
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.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
___________________ I want to be free()!
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
https://about.me/unixbhaskar
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.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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/
Oops, I should have written Firefox 4 for mobiles was released March 29th.
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.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"start acting reasonably" equates to "agree with me", correct?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
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...
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?
Gravity Sucks
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.
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.
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.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
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.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
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.
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.
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.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
You seem to be forgetting that we've moved on from Mosaic good sir :-)
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.
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.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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!!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I find Firefox running on Lubuntu from a USB device runs faster than Windows on the same hardware ...
> 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.
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.
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!).
The fact that there's a program or four in many a page may have something to do with that.
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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!
Gravity Sucks
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++?
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.
___________________ I want to be free()!
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.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
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. /really/ render, and found that the 4ms timeout was the limiting factor.
Firefox with accel, was. So I set it to 0, to see how fast it can
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?
> 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... ;)
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 !
That's great news. Just a clear demonstration of how open source and Firefox make IE look even worse these days.
You are either crazy or misinformed or lying. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_hardware_and_FOSS#ATI.2FAMD
Waka Waka!
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.
Odd, perhaps there's something involving 3D accel in Chrome that's not FOSS'd...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.