Slashdot Mirror
Firefox 9 Released, JavaScript Performance Greatly Improved
MrSeb writes "Firefox 9 is now available — but unlike its previous rapid release forebears where not a lot changed, a huge feature has landed with the new version: the JavaScript engine now has type inference enabled. This simple switch has resulted in a 20-30% JS execution speed increase (PDF), putting JaegerMonkey back in line with Chrome's V8 engine, and even pulling ahead in some cases. If you switched away from Firefox to IE or Chrome for improved JS performance, now is probably the time to give Firefox another shot."
Firefox - Too little, too late?
Too little: Doesn't sound like it, given the writeup of this release.
Too late: An install of pretty much any software is one click away. No software is too late - a later version can fix the problems of earlier versions. Most users don't have any problems with memory usage, don't care about how the footprint compares with this or that version of chrome etc.
Speed was only half the issue that drove people away, the actual rapid releases and incompatibilities with add-ons with these releases among other things.
RockMelt [techcrunch.com] now. Especially RockMelt is an interesting browser - it completely abandons geeky stuff like NoScript or Adblock but instead caters to casual, normal people and how they use the internet. RockMelt has online Facebook friends directly on the site, along with recent news and updates from all social networks. It lets you easily add social bookmarks to sites like Reddit and Digg, along with sharing to Facebook and Twitter. Most people have been saying how wonderful it is compared to Firefox. It's an browser that actual people want.
I thought that sponsored "Ask Slashdot" was a bit much but now we have sponsored first posts?
And RockMeIt has much better astroturfing !
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
it completely abandons geeky stuff like NoScript or Adblock
Oh boy, now I can enjoy adverts featuring rotten teeth and modal popups that insist I "like" them on Facebook again!
Seriously, if I wanted to put up with this crap I'd go back to using IE.
Summation 2
...then you're probably still dealing with the fallout from that time when you switched your brain for a sponge
Who are these "most people"? I heard about RockMelt a year or two ago. I think it was Windows only which wasn't a good start, especially given that I think it was based on Firefox. It's "interesting", but I thought it was long dead. Most sites where you'd want to share something already have share buttons for social networking sites.
Adblock isn't geeky. Nobody likes ads. Apart from you perhaps, since you work in marketing.
which is totally what she said
rockmelt will be the same scam as iron.
Actually the last 3 releases all had some improvements in the memory department (I think 8 had the most improvements) and it looks to me like, there is more to come.
New things are always on the horizon
.... you don't even have a rough idea of how big the changes are , whether there will be compatability issues and so forth. I'm sure the coders have done a good job but whatever marketdroid imbecile thought that every new release must have a major version number markup should frankly be shot. And then forced to use IE 6 for the rest of his days.
Have you tried disabling 'smooth scrolling' (Options/Preferences -> Advanced -> General-tab -> Browsing: use smooth scrolling), I personally don't like it.
It is on by default, someone thinks it is a feature.
New things are always on the horizon
Is JS really that bad?
No JS is not that bad, it's just that sites are making more and more demands from it. Where once upon a time a site might have some simple functions and a few onclick handlers, now it's executing humoungous blocks of JS often tied to DOM calls. Look at apps like Emscripten for example or GWT which spew out a mass of JS code. The JS engine suddenly finds that the time it takes to parse, compile, garbage collect, execute and interact with the DOM suddenly makes a big deal of difference in performance when previously it might not have mattered so much.
The situation is bound to get even worse when tools appear which convert flash into HTML and HTML based animations with bloated JS runtimes of their own become increasingly common features on websites.
368m for three tabs, really Firefox what gives. Let alone on both my Mac and W7 machines it has started to freeze on occasion to the point I actually have force quit it instead of waiting for it to wake up.
They are pulling a Netscape 4.xx lately and that isn't a good thing.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
At work I use FireFox(3.6.x) for some websites and Chrome for others. IE when forced to :)
At home I use FireFox for most websites and Chrome with no desktop or start menu icon for other websites. Sure we can share a login and desktop and you can see the web history dear.
Looks like its actually just a Beta for Firefox 9?
Turns out that Javascript is expected to run faster than compiled assembly language and many people find the slowness to be an unbearable burden. So now Javascript is executed before it is downloaded to improve speed even more.
Almost time to play "plug-in roulette". Which ones will work, which ones not? Where the compatibility is, no one knows!
Still this is just a Beta, maybe I'm being overly pessimistic.
It has a much smaller footprint now than before and does release back memory just not as fast as Chrome does.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Tell that to the entire history of software uptake, ever.
I don't think it's as bad as you make out. I get the impression that version numbers were to be depreceated and replaced with the terms Beta; Aurora and Nightly. Features would be mentioned as landing on Nightly/Aurora, appearing in users' browsers in so many weeks time. Releases themselves (every 6 weeks) aren't news in themselves. If Firefox developers communicate this clearly to reporters, then perhaps perceptions will change.
If users would still benefit from version numbers (e.g. for tech support), then I have a suggestion to make:
Next year, Firefox will be releasing version 12. On that version, there's the option of transitioning to a date-based system, with major versions following the year, and minor versions being incremented every 6 weeks. After version 11, the 1st release with this format would be 12.1; the 2nd release, 12.2; and so on. Here's how it looks like in practice:
* 10.0 January 31, 2012
* 11.0 March 13, 2012
* 12.1 April 24, 2012
* 12.2 June 5, 2012
* 12.3 July 17, 2012
* 12.4 August 28, 2012
* 12.5 October 9, 2012
* 12.6 November 20, 2012
* 13.1 January 1, 2013
Switching to a date-based system has the advantage that users will know what the current version is without having to report it, as the year corresponds to the version. Firefox in 2012 would be referred to as version 12. Reporters would focus on new and upcoming features in Firefox primarily, so that stories have a talking point and posters' comments are pertinent, primarily focused on features and improvements.
An example of an open source group who uses a similar format is Ubuntu (who base the version on the year, and the minor version on a 6 month schedule). Versions matter with this format; but there's still a sense of progression. We know what the version will be in 3 years time - even if we don't know what the features will be. Now try to imagine what Firefox's version would be with the new system, compared with the old one.
Consider that this is an issue that would involve a minor change; would benefit users and reporters (reducing confusion); and improve the quality of comments (on Firefox itself), then I think that Firefox developers will be pleasantly surprised with the results.
If they do want to focus more on development than on numbers, they would benefit by switching to a date system. I hope that some of the Firefox developers read this, as the value of changing merits the effort involved.
Firefox > help > about> "firefox 8.0 checking for updates... firefox is up to date"
www.getfirefox.com
good news your firefox is up to date
tfa
Firefox Beta Release Notes
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
This particular behaviour at least is configurable: set image.mem.discardable to false. (Or, if you decide you prefer a trade-off, lengthen image.mem.min_discard_timeout_ms.)
Too late: An install of pretty much any software is one click away. No software is too late - a later version can fix the problems of earlier versions
That's only true if some other software didn't already fix their problems first. A significant number of users have already switched from Firefox, only being as good as Chrome isn't enough to get anyone to switch back.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Sadly you're probably not going to get a response from the advertroll. He's quick-posted his ad in response to a keyword in the article ("Firefox" probably) and will disappear afterwards. Honestly, I've learned just to ignore the first post/thread in the comments of Slashdot articles now.
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
Most people which install Chrome just install it because Google is a known brandname to them. And Google pretty much is the Internet to them, so they might as well install the Google sanctioned browser.
New things are always on the horizon
Firefox - Too little, too late?
Too little: Doesn't sound like it, given the writeup of this release.
Too late: An install of pretty much any software is one click away. No software is too late - a later version can fix the problems of earlier versions. Most users don't have any problems with memory usage, don't care about how the footprint compares with this or that version of chrome etc.
But it breaks Firefox's major original selling point: extensions. After Firefox 5 the extensions were supposed to be auto-updating in theory.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I just ran something I'm working on in Nightly. The first thing it does is to determine what it can about the client.
var comp; ... }
for( comp in window.navigator ) {
The code above should give values of comp for the keys in window.navigator, but comp remains undefined and the code raises an exception when window.navigator[comp] is examined in the loop. This would be the loop that should fail to execute if there are no values for comp.
I can't say anything about the release, I don't use windows so it probably isn't available to me, but Nightly is broken.
That's because of the memshrink project (earlier report on /.). You can read a weekly status report on Nicholas Nethercote's blog.
Another project that's recently started is called 'Snappy', which aims to increase the responsiveness of users' interactions with Firefox. There's a thread on Mozillazine tracking updates on Snappy.
I think you need to look at your plugin's
the i3 here at work starts in in less then 2 seconds.
All the people I know installed Chrome for one entirely different reason: Speed.
Chrome is so much faster than Firefox and doesn't use nearly as many resources.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
Lol.. how long did the ad firm work to come up with that last line?
I don't really get all these extension complaints. Not once since FF4 have I had an extension fail on update, that I'm aware.
More importantly, some of the extensions I use have absolutely no acceptable substitute in chrome (never mind other browsers), leaving me completely baffled as to why people change just because FF changes their version number at a different pace (though I agree that it is a silly and pointless move).
RockMelt
I thought the sponsored posters would be marked as such on Slashdot?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I meant normal every day endusers, no geeks.
Geeks only have geeks as friends ;-)
New things are always on the horizon
Actually, he responded to me a few times the other day. I'm still unsure whether this is actually his job, or he's just an idiot. The fact that he said he works in advertising probably does mean that at least some of it is part of his job.
which is totally what she said
Yep. IE9 with the tracking protection / privacy filter lists from AdBlockPlus, and it works nearly as well as on Firefox (a little harder to configure, though still easy to turn on or off for a given site).
The fact that people are willing to put up with severely ad-laden sites always amazes me.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I don't agree with this. While Google may be a known brandname, one can say Microsoft is also.
The people I know that are using Chrome are using it for the speed of startup. I am not even talking tech geeks. Family members, having been pushed away from IE by us geeks were using Firefox. But when they saw how fast Chrome started up and loaded pages, they started using it more.
I also started doing that for the quick logon. But for my main surfing, I still want my extensions in Firefox.
I actually resisted moving to Chrome from FireFox and Maxthon (= IE), but it's my primary browser nowadays (I still use FF occasionally and sometimes even IE9). Good performance, few problems, minimal interface. FireFox actually has more branding on the UI than Chrome.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I agree that Chrome is more responsive that Firefox. (Note that I didn't say "faster"...) But to say that it uses less resources is bollocks. Chrome consumes vastly more memory than Firefox and I have less than 10 tabs open. Go ahead, browse for a day and measure it; the total memory usage of Chrome tops Firefox by quite a bit. The UI responsiveness is the only reason why I use Chrome over Firefox.
Chrome might feel snappier, but for some time Firefox uses less memory.
It's not the Javascript performance that makes people switch to another browser, it's the sluggish user interface.
The user interface is written in JavaScript.
If he is in marketing don't discount the "just an idiot" angle.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
even the right click on a link to show the drop down menu takes several seconds
If that is anything but instantaneous, it's time to do a virus scan, wipe all noncritical add-ons and extensions, maybe even the profile, and start over.
because FF changes their version number at a different pace (though I agree that it is a silly and pointless move).
The version number changes quicker because the releases happen quicker. That's not hard to understand.
After reading most of the comments, and not finding many giving praise to a new release of an awesome browser, I thought I would give my thanks.
I personally don't give much worry what version they are, most of my addons work, and the ones that don't I'm geeky enough to be able to edit the RDF file in the zip to fool Firefox into installing it. (If you put a * in the version, your sorted forever until it breaks, which it probably wont).
Increased javascript perf is always welcome, memory management fixes are also good (but ram is cheap so its not a huge issue).
So, thank you to all the Mozilla devs who work hard on their products, it is much appreciated.
I'm looking forward to the new graphics subsystem in the next few releases, and a bit of threading would be good but I realise its very hard to retrospectively design that into such a big application.
I don't use windows so it probably isn't available to me
I don't get what you mean here. Firefox is most certainly not a "Windows-only" product.
but Nightly is broken
It breaks often. That's why there's an Aurora and Beta in between before you even get to a release.
might explain something ... Have FF9 installed, went to their add-ons page and FF9 just froze up completely. 45 seconds later, a dialog shows up, saying that a script is unresponsive.
Make the UI based on JavaScript, and have a setup where a single script can stall all scripts is a recipe for trouble.
Likewise, perhaps some people's experience with extensions breaking is not everyone else's. I've never experienced extension hell; mine just go through perfectly sanely. Attacks on anecdotal evidence cut both ways, you know.
Well, know me: I have switched to Chrome because FF still hasn't implemented a minimal tabs-on-title interface on Linux. That wasn't relevant back when I had a 4:3 monitor, but with a little 16:9, every tiny row makes a difference. Plus I switch tabs a lot and everything sitting on the edge of the screen is simply easier to activate, especially since I like my mice fast. It's not a huge issue, but then again FF and Chromium aren't that different right now - they're both fast enough and use similar resources, so a tiny edge is all one of them can win by.
How is it possible that the default installation of Firefox does not include a setting to disable plugins? Opera and Chrome have this nifty feature where you can start plugins individually by request.
Damn programs wanting to use CPU time! Unforgivable!!
First: That's the wrong way to examine window.navigator anyway. It has a set of known key values. Check them. Second: Test for Firefox 9.0 and you've determined what you need to know about the client. Leave your "everything in window.navigator" hack for other browsers.
Client side presentation / GUI is the future. The trend is to build out data services and transaction handlers on the server but put the rest on the client. JavaScript templating merges the data with DOM markup. This should actually speed things up. Behaviors can be bound inline with the DOM rather than waiting for the browser to build the DOM tree from on page markup. I'm not talking Ajax, it can all be served up static, cached, synchronous with a REST URL that can be bookmarked.
The direction is because maintaining separate server code for desktop/mobile/tablet web plus apps and feeds (Apis) is becoming too burdensome.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
23 tabs over two windows and FF3.6 is using a working set of 358MB. I swear I've never seen the rabid memory problems that every other FF user apparently gets.
I discovered RockMelt today but even if it could run on my two computing platforms (Android and Linux - it doesn't) I'd say "no AdBlock + no NoScript == no thanks." Anyway I agree that it's a compelling browser for most of the people out there (in here being /.)
Chrome has at least one deal-killer bug for me: under certain circumstances it works very poorly on google websites.
Knowing what I do about their technology, my guess is the problem happens when overzealous corporate firewalls block SPDY requests, but it could be something else --- I don't know the cause, but the effect is that anything that hits a google page, or anything that loads google ads or google analytics (i.e., most of the internet) hangs indefinitely in Chrome.
That has kept me from making Chrome my "only" browser. But I also like firebug in firefox, and some things, like the Charles plugin work much better in FF... so what happens for me is, I have two or three browsers open at once constantly, and compartmentalize things...
There is theoretically other room for Safari or IE, for testing or debugging browser specific problems, but since I have tons of tabs and windows open of each browser, using different browsers simplifies the alt-tab switching between modes of working.
And... because I have multiple browsers installed and switch between them, this is a flexible plan. New browser comes along? I'll give it a shot. Get tired of some bug in a browser? pop up another one.
That said, for a while now Chrome has been the "browser upgrade" I put on my friends and family's computers for a while now. If Firefox is better though, that will change.
The requested URL
I don't use chrome, simply because I can't press tab to cycle through my history in the omnibox, this is a 100% show-stopping feature that I need. And I refuse to use the arrow pad, because its simply not natural. Also I tend to have 30+ tabs open in a single window, in chrome they just shrink and shrink until I can't see what any of them are, but in firefox I can use tab mix plus extension and voila now I have tabs wrapping onto multiple lines.
Sure, then leave it open overnight. Firefox leaks like a sieve.
I never close firefox on my living room computer. It's been up for two weeks since I last did a reboot, and it's currently using up 256.6 mb of RAM. Doesn't seem like it's leaking.
I am seeing that it spawned 26 threads, which looks excessive. I assume it's a thread pool for when they actually need it, and that they're not really active right now.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Since when is beta is now "available"? We had access to FF9 via nightly for a long while...
I thought inference was mandatory in a dynamically typed language.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Once I found NotScripts, I recently switched to Chrome and found perceived speed decrease in loading. It might be due to a different order of loading visual elements (different from what I used to), so I pay attention to this.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I've always ran Firefox and still do, but I have to say. My plugins stop working almost every time they update these days. It makes me use Firefox less and less.
The best thing about Firefox was that it viewed sites that other browsers didn't (not talking about IE here) and it's plugins. Firefox could do every thing. Now, each release it breaks everything. :/
Most people *who*. Sorry; copy editor.
I disagree. I think where you're going with this is that most people just sort of install what's easiest or whatever has the ad campaign that speaks loudest to them, but in my admittedly anecdotal, personal experience I have found that even "casual" users are pretty savvy when it comes to web browsers. In my experience, people tend to gravitate towards browsers that emphasize aspects of web use that are most relevant to them, and not always functional aspects.
I know several highly non-technical users who love Firefox because it feels like the least commercial browser. I know many people who use IE *because* of the anti-Microsoft sentiment, as a sort of statement of rebellion. On the other hand, I know a lot of web devs who grudgingly use IE because they have to develop to it, and since it plays fast and loose with standards they have to use it to test.
I personally use Chrome because I don't really bother with Facebook, don't really use extensions for anything, and like the launch speed. Same reason I use IE fairly often. I don't know if it loads pages faster than Firefox (I think it does, but that might be what they call "butt-dyno"), but I know it launches faster. Since I almost never leave a browser open when I'm not using it, that's a major selling point to me. Firefox is neat, and I have it installed, but the lengthy startup time is a killer. And the app tabs (which I found useful, but clunky) don't outweigh the startup speed.
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
I get similar performance after letting FF8 run too long, but my usage pattern is a poster child for the problems with memory and CPU bloat. I open lots of tabs, including Facebook and Gmail, and some heavy Javascript sites required by my job. I leave them open sometimes for days. My only plug-ins are noScript and the JRE. Under my usage pattern, FF often reaches a 400MB footprint.
Now add to that the fact that my home computer is a little MSI Wind U100. 1GB RAM, 1.6GHz Atom processor (2-stage pipeline), and the thrashing is unbearable. Eventually I have to give in and close / restart FF.
I credit most of my troubles to the heavy javascript sites, not FF. I suspect that Facebook in particular is caching massive amounts of data and actually claiming that it uses that memory. At some point I should compare to Chrome to find out, but that's a project from some day when I have the time.
--Somebody infect me with a
So did I.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
No: in fact, very few runtime-typed languages support type inference. What happens instead is that the value gets tagged with a type. E.g., in Python, when I type "x = 3", the variable x has no type attached to it, but the value 3 has the type 'int' attached to it. When the system needs to know type information, it queries the value.
Type inference is a little bit of a hard thing to do in runtime-typed languages. Not impossible, but ... interestingly wacky. Basically, the runtime environment has to be able to make a formal mathematical proof that "there is no code path in which this variable can point to any type of value except an 'int'", or what-have-you. If it's able to do that, then it might be able to optimize access to that value in ways that normal runtime typing can't. E.g., if you know something is always going to be a 32-bit integer, why not store it as a native primitive, rather than wrap it up in an object and have all the associated object overhead? That sort of thing.
Hope this helps!
It's not just you, I don't get them either.
Type Inference in 9.0 wasn't a security fix. Reducing memory usage by 30-50% in 7.0 wasn't either. (I'm sure the other releases had improvements other than security fixes, just nothing that interested me personally).
http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam
In general, anytime code has to be generated by a machine, I'm skeptical. That stuff is going to be absolutely unmaintainable in 10 years. And the tools that generated that code will likely be long gone.
I agree that JS is being used for purposes for which it was never intended. For robust, maintainable applications, you need a strongly-typed language. It seems to me that Java Applets would have eventually filled this space perfectly (a strongly-typed language capable of interacting with the DOM). Unfortunately, Applets were introduced about 15 years too soon (and pretty much killed off by Microsoft), and thus suffered from perceptions of poor performance. And now that Java is owned by Oracle, that opportunity is gone forever.
Wow, looking at the screenshots from that browser, it seems the developers of that browser think that "normal people" like to have some of their valuable screen estate wasted with Facebook buttons and small pictures of their friends... No thank you, I'd rather keep that crap in its own tab. Bring you lame astroturfing elsewhere.
Apparently a product that is still in beta is considered a 'release'.
Its because you dont have retarded memory leaking addons.
I could have sworn Asa or one of the other devs released a blog post when 3.0 came out titled something like "Turn off your damn broken addons before complaining about memory".
368m for three tabs, really Firefox what gives.
How many links have you followed? Firefox saves those in case you want to go Back. How many tabs and windows have you closed recently? Firefox saves those in case you want to reopen tabs (Ctrl+Shift+T) or windows (Ctrl+Shift+N). Which extensions are you using? Can you try disabling one, reopening those three tabs, and checking the memory usage? If so, an extension may have a defect that should be reported to the extension's developer. And how much RAM are other programs using? Is it causing your computer to dip into swap, and if not, why worry about it?
One is "on the Internet" when interacting with an application that connects to another computer through sockets. This is true even when reading e-mail in a native MUA (that is, not webmail) or playing World of Warcraft. Do home PC operating systems provide a way to combine "history" from Chrome, IE, Firefox, Opera, Thunderbird, WOW, and every other program that opens sockets?
New releases usually are though.
Bollocks are they, check the FTP server ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/. I've just downloaded the 64 bit version of Firefox 9.0 for Linux from there.
It used to leak like a sieve; as far as I'm aware its old habitys have been cured in the last few versions
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Install the add-on called "Add-on Compatibility Reporter" and you won't have to manually edit things anymore. Things just work; i installed it around version 5 and every time Firefox updated, 99% of the add-ons that used to say "incompatible" actually worked just fine. (Btw, despite its name, you don't have to report a thing).
In fact, i remember only 1 add-on not working (simply had no effect), which is the one to force youtube videos use a certain quality/resolution, nothing critical.
As someone else said here, all the Firefox bashing must come from people using other browsers. Fine with me, I stay with Firefox, i hate the way Chrome takes over the processor and memory; it may start fast, but later makes the system slow down to a crawl, unless you stick to use a single tab or something...
Firefox might not release memory aggressively while in use, but with the session saved (remember to use Options -> General -> Startup -> Check "Don't load tabs until selected" ) restarting the browser takes no time, and with the Lazarus add-on, you don't even lose anything you have typed in text boxes... I just close the browser when i don't need it knowing everything comes back quickly where i left when its opened again. I also disabled hard disk cache (browser.cache.disk.enable false) memory cache is good enough.
The only thing i would wish Mozilla team to do, is to switch to date based versioning, Ubuntu style (year.month) instead of nonsensical number increases, only a human perception thing. Their LTS plan should address the enterprise concern.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Well lucky you. If I leave Firefox on overnight it eats up over 700MB of memory.
Chrome spawns one thread for each tab, extension and plug-in in addition to a "Browser" thread and a "GPU Process" thread. A summary of the processes is provided in Chrome's task manager (Shift + Esc or right-click on Chrome's chrome and select Task Manager).
Chrome uses significantly more resources than Firefox however it does not suffer from the horrid memory leaks that have plagued Firefox for years: Mozilla Gets "Tough" on Firefox Memory Leaks
As the article states, the memory leaks are a well-known problem. It's an issue that the developers do not seem to be able to fix.
Chrome's performance is exceptional and stable. Firefox's performance is also exceptional at first launch but it can degrade in a matter of minutes to a choppy, annoying experience. If you're using Firefox and haven't already done so, try the Memory Restart add-on. Be sure to display the add-on bar to watch the memory inflate. In my experience, performance starts to degrade around 600 MB.
In a world where RAM is dirt cheap, Chrome is welcome to all it wants to use as long as it maintains its performance. I have 8 GB of RAM installed and rarely see total usage beyond 3 GB.
I switched to Chrome yesterday after at least five years of primary Firefox usage. I'm a bit sad to leave Firefox behind, but I had tired of restarting it four or five times a day just to keep the memory in check.
Ironically, it was the Google toolbar that had kept me tied to Firefox for the last year. I'm now using the Context Search extension in Chrome to achieve similar functionality to the Google toolbar "buttons" in Firefox.
Javascript execution is a good and worthy improvement. I just wish I could get the faster javascript in a UI that was similar to... six versions ago? Seven?
I'd suggest going back to using the suite. SeaMonkey does most of what Firefox does with less of a footprint.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
For this joke: "If you switched away from Firefox to IE [...] for improved JS performance"
It's often due to buggy plugins. The problem with Firefox's single process model is if a plugin or Firefox leaks, you often can't free up memory by closing windows or tabs. You have to close everything.
In contrast even though Google Chrome might actually leak more, you can usually just close the offending tab, and the memory is freed up. You can even reopen the tab without having to log in again. So if a page gradually leaks memory, you can close it once it gets to big and reopen it again. All without losing sessions in your other tabs/windows.
One might say "Don't use those plugins then". But without those plugins there might be no other reason to use Firefox instead of some other browser.
Test for Firefox 9.0 and you've determined what you need to know about the client. Leave your "everything in window.navigator" hack for other browsers.
It is commonly accepted that testing for specific features, instead of specific browser versions, is the better practice. I'm not trying to argue that everything you need to know about a browser is in the window.navigator object, but testing for specific browsers and versions went out of style several years ago.
For example, if you're using ajax, instead of trying to figure out if the client is a specific version of IE you should just test for the existence of the XMLHttpRequest object.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
So now Javascript is executed before it is downloaded to improve speed even more.
Opera's way ahead on that:
Technically, what has to be proved is "for all code paths we can identify if the value is not an int." And then it can provide a backoff/error handler case when the value isn't an int. The issue is that typically the the error handler is significantly slower than doing it the naive way. So there is a cut-off point where the optimization because a net win, and generally you need some amount of profiling/feedback to correctly identify that cut-off.
no comment
maybe its just me but i simply can't stand non-smooth scrolling on a touch pad. when i use the wheel of a mouse to scoll, its okay, but when sliding my finger along the touchpad edge, i have to have smooth scrolling. and usually i'm on my laptop using the touchpad. and firefox's smooth scolling is not actually smooth. it jerks and freezes up randomly for fractions of seconds. this is the main reason i left firefox :(
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
...can I just expect all the sites already bloated with slow, broken JavaScript to just increase said cruft by 20-30% to take advantage of this?
Liberty in your lifetime
I'm still waiting for them to fix bug 490122. Opened over 2.5 years ago, 296 comments.
Not to mention bug 484964, also over 2.5 years old, recently marked as a duplicate of the above.
I believe that pages with lots of images or thumbnails (in particular Google image search et al.) exacerbate the problem.
Add AutoPager to the mix and you got yourself a memory hog that:
1) Pauses every 10 seconds or so for about a second (or even more), affecting videos, typing, everything...
and, more importantly, uses 100% CPU so it impacts other programs as well. I have to close it in order to watch a video.
2) Eventually exhausts memory and hangs forever at 100% CPU usage.
Seriously, it's like a car engine that keeps overheating while the mechanics are concerned with the equalizer controls on the sound system.
It's about time, the performance of Firefox has suffered greatly the last few version. even the right click on a link to show the drop down menu takes several seconds on a 2 GB mac mini (2009 model). At the moment Chrome is the best choice performance wise, but I prefer Firefox.
dude, there is somehing seriously wrong with your pc.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
bug 490122. Opened over 2.5 years ago, 296 comments.
bug 484964, also over 2.5 years old, recently marked as a duplicate of the above.
Forgot to mention: both bugs "Assigned To: Nobody; OK to take it and work on it"
i find that extremely hard to believe. also, firefox without lots of addons is worse than ie.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
This is why I love Tree Style Tabs. You get the tab bar on the left (or wherever else you like it), tabs structured hierarchically, collapsible trees and all that fancy stuff, including vertical screen estate.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Thanks for the advice, just a couple of questions: Does it support ABP? And NoScript? I have ABP in Dragon but I do miss NoScript, frankly NoScript on my XP machine was the reason i tried to keep FF for so long.
And notice how quickly the fangirls squicked and modded me down? Is there a SINGLE thing I posted that hasn't been known since the dawn of time? Is there ANYBODY here that didn't know that FF runs like shit on AMD, that it spikes the CPU on single cores and netbooks and that it goes through memory like crap through a goose? Its not like I just made this stuff up off the top of my head folks, I can sit here and watch my mem and CPU load in AnVir Task Manager and literally typing this text in FF causes the CPU to jump with each keystroke!
Seriously when typing in a fricking text box causes CPUs to bounce like a hooptie on air shocks to quote the old K's Choice song "Something's Wrong". But I didn't try to push Dragon which is my main browser now, I sincerely hope one day FF devs will get their shit together and bring back the FF of yore. Frankly I could deal with memory leaks, its the CPU spikes I simply can't tolerate anymore. When I lose a good 40 minutes on the battery because it keeps slamming my E-350? "Something's Wrong".
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Well, there is that...and the whole stability issue. I am still not interested until it gets stable. I guess some people have had some success with it not crashing, but it crashes all the time for me and my wife on different computers/OSs. And no, we don't run any special extensions or anything. Chrome doesn't crash doing the same thing on the same machine...so we use that now.
Also, from what I've heard, much of Chrome's recent "growth" in install base is a function of the malware-esque techniques that Google has been using to have auto-install when people install other, popular, software packages. This just means it's on their system. It doesn't mean that they're actually using it.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
It's too late because Google is putting a formidable marketing force behind Chrome. We need some Firefox super bowl ads, oh an let's advertise it in a very high traffic page like youtube!
But... the future refused to change.
Do you happen to use any plug-ins with it? The problem may be with a third party software and not Firefox.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
Download link for Firefox 9.0 (en-US): http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-9.0&os=win&lang=en-US
Run the Peacekeeper benchmark and watch during the Canvas and HTML5 video tests. You'll see that Chrome and Firefox are the only MAJOR browsers that don't suck at video and Canvas. Overall, Opera 11.6 performed well, but video was jerky on all supported codecs. Chrome (16.0.x tested) handled all the codecs correctly, handled the Canvas test correctly, and was fastest overall. FF (8.0.1 tested) handled most of the codecs, handled Canvas correctly, but overall performance was about 1/2 that of Chrome. Safari 5.x on Mac OS 10.6 handles video well, but didn't do well on the current Canvas test and failed to complete the benchmark.
Notes: I tested on WinXP and Mac OS 10.6, therefore, I haven't tried IE9. I did not have Adobe Flash installed, except the built-in Flash in Chrome, so Chrome may (or may not) have had an advantage on the video codecs. Tests were run on 1.86GHz and 2.2GHz Core2 Duo systems with plenty of RAM and decent video controllers (plenty fast enough for video and low/mid range games, but not anything a "gamer" would even consider). YMMV.
With so much video on the internet these days, and especially now that Adobe has finally acknowledged that Flash isn't the future, I believe that the above tests a relevant to the average user. Until Opera addresses the poor video playback issue, no amount of JS performance is going to win them market share. IE9 being Win7 only (Vista doesn't count) puts some limits on it's market for now. So, it comes down to Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Safari on Windows sucks.
So, the real choice for most users comes down to Chrome vs Firefox, and both are good choices (each with strengths and weaknesses). Safari (Mac OS), IE (Win) have the advantage of being installed by default, and they can be competitive on their native platforms if you're using the latest versions, but don't have much to recommend them beyond being preinstalled. Chrome is faster, FF has more plugins and configurability. Take your pick.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Firefox made that the default somewhere back in version 4. Eliminating the menu bar was version 3.something. (Much to the horror of people too dumb to right-click on empty space and tick/untick those changes.) Somewhere around then they eliminated the add-on bar at the bottom of the screen. You can even turn off the Navigation bar, which leaves you with the tabs-on-title bar and the render-window and that's it. How much more space can you get?
(However, I don't use Linux, so you may be talking about something OS specific.)
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I leave stuff open all the time on my machine, and I have no problems. It's a somewhat old machine (basic line macbook from 2008), but I've never had any problems with keeping it [Linux or OS X partition] running for weeks or months. Nor do I have a problem with having Firefox open indefinitely, so long as I keep away from Flash apps. I have chrome too (I got it early, before it was cool and mainstream :P), and it's the same situation. Perfectly good until a plugin goes wonky; though the rest of the chrome browser didn't [usually] crash.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Does it support ABP? And NoScript?
Yes. I have SeaMonkey running with both of them.
If [right click] is anything but instantaneous, it's time to do a virus scan, wipe [...] and start over.
Not necessarily. If the web browser sucks up enough RAM to cause the system to start swapping, then the user might have to wait while the right-click code swaps in.
I have historically been a lazy power user. Because I'm a power user I tend to open lots of web pages; because I'm lazy I tend to leave them open. I have had the web browser push my system into swapping many times, to the point where I am now modifying my behavior to accommodate the web browser (in other words, I'm trying to close more tabs more often).
At worst, the swapping gets so bad the system is unusable. I "only" have 4GB of RAM; one would think that should be enough even for a lazy power user.
If you aren't sure whether your system is swapping, look at the hard disk light. If it's on continuously, your system is swapping. One thing you can try to fix it: erase all the browsing history, make sure the browser will remember all your tabs, and quit and restart the browser. If the browser is noticeably snappier (and you see the hard disk light isn't on) then your problem was the swapping.
If your system isn't swapping and it's slow for the right-click menu to pop up, I agree you should worry.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
My point was not that window.navigator doesn't contain the information you need, but rather that iterating through every property is a stupid way to test for specific features.
If you want to know whether the window.navigator object contains certain keys, you check for window.navigator.key1, window.navigator.key2, etc. You don't just iterate through the whole thing to find what you're looking for.
The window.navigator object contains this finite list of properties and methods (on Firefox - similar lists can be created for any other browser) - and not even all of them are of interest to you. There's absolutely no reason to use "for...in".
Most users don't have any problems with memory usage, don't care about how the footprint compares with this or that version of chrome etc.
Most users don't care about how the memory footprint compares, but they do care that "when Firefox is like open and stuff, everything else is kinda like I dunno slower and stuff, so I switched to Chrome cause you said it was fast. Now my whole computer is faster!"
Keep on knockin'
https://robbiecrash.me
As a mozilla user from way back, I've been heavily using it from the beginning. Many popular complaints are partially if not completely true. Since 3.6 the memory use has gone nuts and while I don't mind a doubling of RAM use or how it ignores the cap I put into the about:config I DO MIND how it has since version 4 used so much RAM and then gets slow and locks up for seconds while it manages all that cached data.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
So I really really do not want to use Firefox at all due to security risks of Java 6.
In IE I have it disabled in the internet zone so it never executes. To my pleasant surprise Chrome does not enable it by default even if it is installed as of Chrome 16. Until that is fixed Firefox is going to stay off. I see the loading Java applet A LOT in porn sites trying to exploit my system.
Flash has many vulnerabilities too and is almost as bad. At least you can block flash a little bit or Chrome will automatically update it for you for security purposed. Unfortunately it makes it more crash prone in youtube.
http://saveie6.com/
Come on moderators this is not flamebait.
Chrome does not follow the RFC standards on TCP/IP so it can have faster loading time. This can wreck havoc on some poorly configured routers, proxies, and SPDY requests with firewalls as well. IE 9 has some of the same issues but not as much as Chrome as they are imitating the same tricks with fast response and loads aka packet storm. Many corporations want to stay with IE 8 for these reasons.
Every browser has its strengths and weaknesses. I will say all IE and Chrome are improving nicely to compete agaisnt Firefox and it looks like we can finally adopt standards and stop sticking with 1 browser for 7 years like we did with IE 6. That is a good thing.
I have a few issues with Chrome myself as I found it crashes often with Flash when I watch movies online or listen to music on youtube. Firefox is HUGE and buggy, and IE lacks the addons and is a little behind with HTML 5 support. So there I bashed all of them
http://saveie6.com/
I also find that Chromium (don't know about Chrome) has more trouble with flash media than Firefox. In Chromium, some videos take forever to download, but if I try it in Firefox (8) it does so instantly and start playing right away. I've repeated the operation on those sites where I observed this and it was quite constant. I don't know why that should be. But it certainly doesn't incite me to switch over.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
The problem is that Firefox uses custom networking libraries instead of using the system libraries. This means it takes longer for the application to load because it has to load the custom libraries, unlike IE and Chrome which just link to the system libraries.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
Yeah, it's a Mac.
I heard Rockmelt spies on you to an even larger degree than Chrome, and that it actually searches your hard drive for credit card numbers and bank account information.
I think I will wait for Firefox10 - I heard it's going to be out early next week.
It runs pretty well all Firefox extensions since SM 2 including noscript and ABP and generally is faster. I haven't benchmarked it in a long time but there was a time when SeaMonkey could load Slashdot close to twice as fast as Firefox, this on a dialup connection where the limiting factor should be how fast it can download the page, not spiking the CPU for twice as long. Memory usage is probably close to the same, right now with about 120 tabs open on an old 1GB machine I have 536 MBs free. This is an old OS/2 box so the operating system itself is much lighter even with 15 years of cruft.
Possibly the problem with AMD and Firefox is the profile guided build they do. If they're using Intel hardware, it's going to be optimized for Intel. Another option for you would be to try the mingw build.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Chrome does not follow the RFC standards on TCP/IP so it can have faster loading time.
What, does it include its own implementation of TCP that uses raw sockets or something? No? Then it must be using the TCP/IP implementation that comes with the OS it's running on. SPDY isn't some tweaked non-standard version of TCP/IP--it's a tweaked non-standard version of HTTP (or perhaps a layer between HTTP and TCP, depending on how you look at things).
Wouldn't happen to have a link? all I found under mingW search was links to the compiler. i've tried Pale Moon (which is an SSE optimized FF) but frankly it really didn't seem to help much. You'd think that being a FOSS browser they would use a FOSS toolchain like GCC or Open64 but if they are using the Intel compiler that would explain why FF runs like shit on AMD.
All I know is it seems to do a lot less spiking on this old 1.6GHz P4 I'm working on for a customer than my brand new E-350 or even my 6 core Thuban so I have to wonder if its not something they are doing which makes it favor Intel CPUs. Since I no longer sell Intel CPUs since it came out they were bribing OEMs that makes the current FF a non starter for me, but both Chromium and Dragon seem to be CPU agnostic. If this Mingw build you are talking about allows FF or Seamonkey either one to run well on AMD chips i'll be happy to add it to my freeware CD I give to every customer as well as try it myself, as I do try to spread free software where i can.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You can disable the java plugin in the Add-ons Manager. Just go to the "Plugins" and disable the java plugin.
Firefox is 37mb installed, Chrome is 162mb (though there is a file labelled installer which is roughly half that)
Chrome does consume more memory than Firefox tab for tab, but one important thing to note about Chrome's memory usage is that even though it can take a bit of memory, you are more likely to get it back. Open up 50 tabs and close all but 1, and Chrome will shed the resources almost instantaneously.. Firefox will take longer to free up memory and won't give all of it back. This works great for me because, while I usually go long periods of time between closing the browser completely, I open and close tabs constantly, so each new tab in Chrome is like a fresh start, whereas with Firefox it's all still running in the same process.
Chrome's modular design is the real reason I use Chrome. It not only makes it faster but more reliable and efficient as well.
The only thing I don't like about Chrome is that the Linux port is not as good as the (presumably native) Windows build. I'd stick with Firefox just because it's more free and it runs beautifully on Linux.
Try disabling Flash.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
They do, but didn't originally. It's not widely used yet.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
ok i'm actually using firefox again after a loooooong time and its actually quite usable! not as smooth as chrome but very close! i'm switching back!
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
The only reason for me to stay with FF over the last years was Opera not working correctly with /. Last week I updated my Opera to 11.6 and wow, / working as it was meant to be :-) FF has become way to slugish as an application and a few milliseconds more or less faster with javascript while browsing doesn't really give me the 'Zwitserleven' feeling....
I installed it on the desktop connected to the (1080p) TV because of Angry Birds. They released an HTML 5 version to promote the browser.
I tried it out at work, brought it home.
Chrome doesn't annoy me with updates and incompatibilities. It's easy, it's simple. FireFox is a language (XUL) written in another language (C/++), and a memory or disk hog.
I don't care how it does stuff, I want my browser to show stuff quickly. IE doesn't, FF doesn't, Chrome does. Click, boom, book it, done.
Chrome doesn't work for me, since it does not allow sidebar tabs. Opera, on the other hand, does. Still no tree-style tabs, but I can live without that for a while. This announcement just served as a nice reminder to uninstall Firefox.
Not a sentence!
I agree, it's the one thing Opera is missing for me. Happily tabs can at least be put in the sidebar and grouped.
Not a sentence!
This is why I love Tree Style Tabs. You get the tab bar on the left (or wherever else you like it), tabs structured hierarchically, collapsible trees and all that fancy stuff, including vertical screen estate.
I'm also quite pleased with Tree Style Tabs. When I'm researching something, I can have dozens of tabs open and organized by how I got to each one. No other browser can have as many tabs and be even remotely useful for finding them.
FF 9 wasn't showing as available earlier, but I just downloaded in and ran Peacekeeper. My testing shows a slight (~3%) decrease in JS performance vs FF8.01. While that's trivial, it's far short of the 20%-30% increase they're claiming.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Save you a bit of searching:
EasyList Ad Blocking List - http://easylist-msie.adblockplus.org/easylist.tpl
EasyPrivacy Tracking Protection List - http://easylist-msie.adblockplus.org/easyprivacy.tpl
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I think the biggest issue for JS is there are multiple implementations of it and the DOM and each is a moving target. If you look at GWT (for example), you must specify what user agents your app must run on and it spits out different JS for each of them. So IE, Opera, Chrome and Firefox all run different JS generated from the same input.
I'd have zero confidence that the code GWT spits out now would still function properly 10 years hence. But I'd have zero confidence that even hand written code in JQuery / Dojo etc would work properly either. It might sort-of work but a lot of the details in implementation could change so subtle and not so subtle behavioural and rendering issues could crop up. I think that as long as you write your apps with open source tools that you are relatively safe though. If Google discontinued GWT tomorrow then someone else would pick it up or at least maintain it and I would anticipate that I would run the tool over the source again to produce JS which did work with more recent browsers.
Let me know when Firefox make tabs independent. Having one tab freeze the entire Firefox made me move to Chrome. It happened WAY too often. Oh, and the crashes.
clearing my mod
Profile manager is broken.. No real way to have multiple profiles running, while allowing URL to be opened in any of them
Scam is a big word. But chromium is just okay, thats the message.