Firefox Notably Improved In Tom's Hardware's Latest Browser Showdown

Why IE9 did well by Stonent1 · 2012-07-07 03:22 · Score: 5, Insightful

Because the browser is part of the OS, the RAM is already in use as part of the windows explorer.

Re:Why IE9 did well by Bill+Dimm · 2012-07-07 03:43 · Score: 4, Interesting

It is interesting that IE uses 1276 MB for 40 tabs, so 1276/40 = 31.9 MB/tab, while with only one tab open it takes 31 MB, i.e. there seems to be no memory overhead for the software itself. For comparison, Firefox uses 794 MB for 40 tabs, so 19.85 MB/tab, and 61 MB when there is only one tab open, so an overhead 41 MB for the software itself.
Re:Why IE9 did well by icebike · 2012-07-07 03:59 · Score: 4, Interesting

while with only one tab open it takes 31 MB, i.e. there seems to be no memory overhead for the software itself
Which is exactly what the GP was saying: that any browser written into a specific OS can use the facilities of the OS itself to mask its true size.
Its sort of like measuring the memory impact of the Chrome browser running on a Chrome-OS tablet.
But disregarding memory utilization by the browser itself, your numbers are pretty interesting all by themselves.
What the heck is IE doing with that extra 11meg per tab when there are multiple tabs open? The web page itself is only the size that it is, and presumably the tests all loaded the same pages in the same order. 11meg is a pretty good guess for the average size of pages. Its almost as if IE build a page in the background and handing the whole thing to the render engine while keeping a copy as backup.
I wonder if the tests were run in a memory constrained machine? The idea that unused ram is wasted ram might lead some of these developer to use what is available more or less freely depending on available ram.

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Re:Why IE9 did well by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 04:06 · Score: 0

any browser written into a specific OS can use the facilities of the OS itself to mask its true size.
Then I presume your bloat formula accounts for all the dependencies for GNU right? Ohhhh double standards I get it... I challenge you to make an apples to apples comparison: measure the cost of X, Mesa, GL, window manager, etc, etc, etc + Firefox vs. Windows 7 + IE 9.
"masking its true size" ROFL
Hey guys IE9 is cheating by using OS libraries!!!!!!!!!
Re:Why IE9 did well by ntropia · 2012-07-07 04:09 · Score: 0

The fact that IE is reported using less RAM is a sign. It means that the people who wrote the article don't know necessarily what they are talking about (and, by extension, that among tech sites, not only Slashdot is sucking more and more, recently).
Re:Why IE9 did well by fermion · 2012-07-07 04:13 · Score: 3, Interesting

Whatever you think of MS, they have cleaned up IE and it is a better browser. Yes, one of the reasons is that it is only on MS Windows. For this reason I would say it should not be in the running at all, and they should test on various platforms. However, this is a browser on MS Windows test, so the results are for MS only. The advantage is inherent, but not unfair. The results are likely meaningless on any other platform.
That said, the memory has not effect on total rankings. I don't know if they did this to make sure Chrome scored well, or if it was a legitimate decision. In any case, most of us have large amounts of ram, so 10 megabytes per web page is not going to kill us. What I would like to know, and what is important, is who memory is used over time. This is where Firefox used to be really bad.
So when i look at this test, what I want is HTML5, reliability, and CSS. In CSS and Acid3, it is Safari. In reliability it is Opera. With HTML5 it is IE. Chrome does not really do anything with which I am deeply concerned. In the results Chrome and Firefox are a statistical tie. As I mentioned, it is easy to believe the test may have been altered so that chrome would win. The "ads by google" provides a motive.
IE essentially in losing place with Safari seems suspicious considering it did so well in some many test.

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Re:Why IE9 did well by ewanm89 · 2012-07-07 04:14 · Score: 1

Or IE is doing what chrome does and has the overhead on every single tab. Which I would point out is why chrome is so high on memory usage compared.
Re:Why IE9 did well by Agent+ME · 2012-07-07 04:25 · Score: 1

IE's overhead could be per-tab.
Re:Why IE9 did well by bhcompy · 2012-07-07 04:26 · Score: 3, Informative

Because each IE tab is it's own instance(like Chrome). Each FF tab is under the parent process.
Re:Why IE9 did well by icebike · 2012-07-07 04:27 · Score: 3, Informative

Yes in some cases it does apply to some GNU situations. Its just that there are very few browsers written into any other OS.
The size of KDE's built in browser, Konqueror, often could not be distinguished from the rest KDE because it was dependent on having so much else of KDE installed. Installing on top of Gnome pulled in a mountain of other packages. Even when Gnome had X, a window manger and all the same linux core libraries already installed.
So in your childish attempt to make a point you've only proven mine.
And the fact that you don't understand the difference between running an application under an operating system and running an application as PART of an operating system is pretty telling.

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Re:Why IE9 did well by Bill+Dimm · 2012-07-07 04:33 · Score: 1

Good point. But, Chrome uses 1449 MB for 40 tabs, so 36 MB per tab, and uses 91 MB when there is only one tab open, so Chrome has an overhead (unlike IE) of 55 MB for the software.
Re:Why IE9 did well by arth1 · 2012-07-07 04:46 · Score: 2

The idea that unused ram is wasted ram might lead some of these developer to use what is available more or less freely depending on available ram.
Oh, how I hate that. Available != unused.
Modern operating systems use memory for caching, and while it's available, the developer's assumption that it's better used for only his program instead of the system as a whole tends to be wrong. It's especially wrong when the developer decides to use it for caching what's on disk. That is almost always better left to the OS, which can take into account other disk accesses that you don't see.
I run dozens of programs at the same time, and expect them to play ball. If they don't, and assume every user is a single-tasking full-screen user, and only their program matters, the programs go in the trash.
Re:Why IE9 did well by AsmCoder8088 · 2012-07-07 04:52 · Score: 2

I would like to point out that your calculation of the memory per tab is slightly off. Because the first tab includes memory for both itself and the software overhead, in order to compute the actual memory/tab you need to remove the first tab's contribution from the computation.
In other words, using your observation of 61MB for the first tab in Firefox, you would subtract 61 from 794MB to arrive at 733MB for the remaining 39 tabs. This yields a more accurate memory/tab value of 18.79MB.
You could do the same for the IE memory/tab value as well, except as you noted, there is no software overhead, so the memory/tab would be the same even if you factored it out.
Re:Why IE9 did well by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 04:59 · Score: 0

Hello Mr Windows 98, I hope you're enjoying your ActiveDesktop widgets.
If you check Process Explorer on a modern version, Windows Explorer doesn't load mshtml.dll, which is the meat of IE. Also, the memory savings for sharing other DLLs is very minimal on a modern system, and probably mostly improves startup time (where IE was mediocre). Rendering a big pile of HTML/CSS/JS requires a bunch of RAM which simply can't be hidden somewhere.
Re:Why IE9 did well by arth1 · 2012-07-07 05:06 · Score: 2

Good point. But, Chrome uses 1449 MB for 40 tabs, so 36 MB per tab, and uses 91 MB when there is only one tab open, so Chrome has an overhead (unlike IE) of 55 MB for the software.
Personally, I think anyone who runs 40 tabs needs to learn about bookmarks and/or window management...
Re:Why IE9 did well by Bill+Dimm · 2012-07-07 05:27 · Score: 1

Yes, I know. I made an approximation because I thought it would make it easier for readers to follow. I should not have written the numbers out to so many digits since I knew they were approximate, though.
Re:Why IE9 did well by GNious · 2012-07-07 05:30 · Score: 1

They looked at the RAM usage for the process/image, instead of the difference in free+cache RAM between not running and running? Flaw process is flawed.
Re:Why IE9 did well by hairyfeet · 2012-07-07 05:53 · Score: 1

Or maybe its due to the simple fact that your average IE user doesn't use tabs and therefor that is what the IE team targets their optimization towards while the others are targeting tabs?
Dealing with customers down at the shop I can tell you that IE users by and large don't have a damned clue about tabs and will instead open new windows so frankly its no surprise that single tabs would be where the IE devotes their time. Hell it took me over a year to teach my dad not to automatically go for a new window when i moved him away from IE a few years back and to this day he won't open more than 3, he says its "too cluttered' to have any more and will instead open a new instance and switch between.
As for the results while I'm glad to see the FF guys caring about memory, could we maybe get a fork that goes back to the old UI....please? I switch back and forth between Dragon and FF ESR because I still miss the fox but I just can't take the new UI and if they stick with what they've been showing its gonna end up a Metro mess around the first of next year, so can we please please PLEASE have a fork with the new memory management under the old UI...pretty please?

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Re:Why IE9 did well by drinkypoo · 2012-07-07 06:01 · Score: 1

Personally, I think anyone who runs 40 tabs needs to learn about bookmarks and/or window management...
I don't disagree with your overall point, but you can easily have those 40 tabs spread out between a multitude of windows.

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Re:Why IE9 did well by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 06:06 · Score: 0

assume every user is a single-tasking full-screen user,
That's increasingly true, though. More and more, people use computers in exactly that way, and there are now entire OSs built around the idea as a central paradigm.
Not trying to say it is good or bad, just that the common use model is changing.
Re:Why IE9 did well by arth1 · 2012-07-07 07:15 · Score: 1

I don't disagree with your overall point, but you can easily have those 40 tabs spread out between a multitude of windows.
This is true, and makes much more sense.
However, the benchmark here seems to assume that people only run one browser window with an enormous amount of tabs.
Re:Why IE9 did well by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 07:20 · Score: 0

In Firefox, I've got 5 tabs open at 933MB. They've been open for days. I guess they don't test for long term efficiency or leaks.
Re:Why IE9 did well by dgatwood · 2012-07-07 07:54 · Score: 5, Informative

IE is a better browser than it used to be, but it started out so far behind that they're going to be catching up for a while yet.
For example, their DOM selection range support is still way behind, as is their memory management. (It is absolutely unacceptable to tell JavaScript coders that they should not add methods to an element or they'll cause memory leaks. I mean, really!?!)
And IE still has fascinatingly severe bugs. For example, create a trivial HTML page that uses Javascript to set the src property of an existing iframe to the same URL as the loading page, and none of the JavaScript scripts on the second page ever run. (IE 9) The only robust workaround I've found is to replace the iframe with a new element. That workaround, in turn, when combined with IE's hack where they dispose of the DOM tree for an iframe's contents when the iframe is detached even if parts of it are still in use by JavaScript code (their hack "fix" for the aforementioned memory leaks) led to hours of extra debugging for me. (Wait, how can contentDocument.body legally be null?)
And it is fairly easy to wedge things using its development pane. And its contentEditable support is seriously subpar. (You can't easily select content that spans a div boundary, for example.) And it caches XHR requests when other browsers don't, which caused me lots of headaches (though admittedly I should have been sending appropriate headers to begin with).
Even in its current, much-improved state, IE is still a plague. If they keep up this level of improvement, it might be a viable browser for the website I'm developing in 5 years. As it is, I'm going to support Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, but I have no plans to support IE at this time. It just isn't feasible to work around all the bugs—even in IE 9. We'll see about IE 10, but I'm not holding my breath.

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Re:Why IE9 did well by AmiMoJo · 2012-07-07 09:06 · Score: 1

The problem with Safari is the bloatware. For example Apple wanted the fonts to render exactly the same way as they do on MacOS so they included the MacOS font rendering system and core fonts. It seems odd that it would do any better at all in CSS tests because it uses Webkit, the same as Chrome.
The Apple updater software is terrible too. Having said that the Google one is kinda evil as well, although at least it is silent most of the time. That is the one area Firefox really has got it right.

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Re:Why IE9 did well by MrL0G1C · 2012-07-07 09:19 · Score: 1

I now have 16gb ram, previously I had 4gb - why would I not want Firefox to use this? I don't get this strange aversion to using RAM that Slashdotters have.
If someone wants to test how Firefox works on low-memory systems then do that but don't moan about having gigs of ram which get used, that's just silly.

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Re:Why IE9 did well by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 12:03 · Score: 0

They didn't say what memory metric they were using. If it's private working set, a lot of things like code get left out. If it's total working set then things get double counted, For example there will only be one copy of a dll or exe in memory, but will be counted in each tab process. Also both working set metrics can be flawed if there is memory pressure on the system that results in working set trimming, which will likely happen in the 40 tab test. So I'd take all of the memory metrics with a very large grain of salt.
Re:Why IE9 did well by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 12:33 · Score: 0

Your math is off, you forgot to subtract the 41MB from the total before dividing by 40, but your point is correct about IE cheating to have the lowest number with 1 tab open.
Re:Why IE9 did well by ZosX · 2012-07-08 03:19 · Score: 1

Yeah, but IE likely shares a lot of libraries that are already loaded at boot, so its overall memory footprint would be smaller as a result.

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Re:Why IE9 did well by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-08 04:04 · Score: 0

The 90's called and they want their cooperative multitasking back. I don't know why MS still has it; it was supposed to be a short lived arrangement.
Re:Why IE9 did well by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-08 08:39 · Score: 0

Wow, just how much of a snob are you?
Re:Why IE9 did well by DuckDodgers · 2012-07-08 13:13 · Score: 1

It's possible they're juggling figures to give Chrome the edge, but Firefox did win the last three browser Grand Prix competitions at the site.
Re:Why IE9 did well by DuckDodgers · 2012-07-08 13:19 · Score: 1

Low memory use has two advantages. First, it lets you recommend the browser to people in your social circle with weaker hardware than you. I have 12GB of RAM, I could use Firefox at its worst just fine - but I couldn't recommend it to friends and relatives who have 2GB of RAM or less. Now I can.

Second, we geeks get hung up on performance comparisons, just like a car shopper who gets a Mazdaspeed 3 over a Honda Civic SI when he has no intention of racing, just because the Mazdaspeed 3 is faster on paper. ( If you prefer the Mazdaspeed 3 because you tried them both and you found the Mazda to be more fun to drive, that's fine. Just don't make your choice just because racing comparisons between the two cars put the Mazda ahead. ) We like to know we're using the most resource efficient software that gets the job done - and until recently, Firefox was noticeably behind the other browsers for efficient use of memory. That was a psychological drawback, if not a real problem.

Not surprising... by knarf · 2012-07-07 03:22 · Score: 1, Redundant

It does not surprise me that IE has the lowest working storage use when idle (only one tab open) as parts of IE (eg. the rendering engine) are most likely loaded on boot because they are used elsewhere in the operating system.

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Re:who gives a fuck by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 03:24 · Score: 1, Informative

Perhaps those of us designing standard software sets for an enterprise... too bad none of the browsers tested are fit as they all use some retarded form of automatic update that will break said standards.

Isn't IE embedded into the OS where possible by G3ckoG33k · 2012-07-07 03:25 · Score: 1, Redundant

"IE 9 is still king of the lowest RAM usage for just one tab"

But, I thought IE was embedded into WinXP and Win7?

No wonder if it is.

Re:Isn't IE embedded into the OS where possible by fluffythedestroyer · 2012-07-07 03:33 · Score: 1

embedded or not it doesnt help since ie9 has a ram of 1276 with 40 tabs in that TH's chart. Firefox is not embedded and they win which proves that even if a software is embedded or not it all comes down to the devs or the code in other words.
Re:Isn't IE embedded into the OS where possible by GIL_Dude · 2012-07-07 03:54 · Score: 1

Actually it has a lot to do with the isolation model. Both Chrome and IE have a process per tab. Firefox has one process for the whole set of tabs. This means that Firefox is much more likely to go completely non-responsive when - for example - flash is in the middle of crashing (which it is lief to do). In fact, I see Firefox do this fairly often. Chrome and IE on the other hand, use a process per tab which allows them to have better isolation of one tab from another and also allows other tabs to remain responsive when Flash does it thing or some script doesn't run very quickly. (Note that they can't always be 100% responsive when one tab goes south as they do need a process coordinating all the others - but in general they do better than FF does at remaining responsive). Although the memory cost for loading the same DLL, over and over is negligible (simply another handle object), there are resources that can not be shared between processes (due to either OS design, browser protection / isolation scheme, etc.). So the browsers that start a process per tab gain some small security benefit, responsiveness benefit, etc. But they also lose out on the "small memory footprint" since they have to have a copy per process (tab) of the non-shareable resources. Knowing the design, you should absolutely expect there to be a threshold of number of tabs where FF will have less memory use than IE or Chrome.
Re:Isn't IE embedded into the OS where possible by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 04:03 · Score: 1

That is a myth spread by Google from thee first days of Chrome. Open 50 tabs, check out taskmgr (or top). Do you have 50 chrome processes listed? No you won't. In the early days Chrome was limited to 10 processes, these days I'm not sure how many. But definitely not one process per tab. Dunno about IE.
Re:Isn't IE embedded into the OS where possible by icebraining · 2012-07-07 04:08 · Score: 4, Informative

Your knowledge is outdated. Firefox has separated plugins like Flash into their own processes using plugin-container multiple versions ago. You can kill the process without bringing Firefox down, and in fact I've done just that many times.

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Re:Isn't IE embedded into the OS where possible by ewanm89 · 2012-07-07 04:16 · Score: 2

That's why firefox spawns plugins off in a separate process.
Re:Isn't IE embedded into the OS where possible by Billly+Gates · 2012-07-07 11:00 · Score: 1

Flash can be spawn, but not each of the 40 tabs like other browsers.

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Re:Isn't IE embedded into the OS where possible by TrentC · 2012-07-07 16:37 · Score: 1

Firefox has separated plugins like Flash into their own processes using plugin-container multiple versions ago.
This is Firefox we're talking about; "multiple versions ago" could mean as far back as March.
Re:Isn't IE embedded into the OS where possible by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-08 04:30 · Score: 0

It was 1 year 4 months ago when version 4 came out. So yes, GIL_Dude's information outdated. Probably because he likes to troll more than to know what he's talking about. Most people who bitch about Firefox haven't used it since the 3.X days and rely on the noise from other trolls to figure out what to regurgitate at every mention of Mozilla or Fierfox.
Don't be sad. I'm sure if you try harder you can say something just as stupid as GIL_Dude.
Re:Isn't IE embedded into the OS where possible by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-08 10:22 · Score: 0

It is outdated, but the conclusion is correct. I regularly have Firefox go unresponsive for short periods because of something happening in one tab. Usually it's a misbehaving javascript in one of the tabs, but it freezes up the entire browser sot hat it doesn't do anything. Fortunately, it usually becomes responsive again in a fairly short time, but it's really annoying.
Allegedly they were working on splitting up the rendering engine into per page processes so that the only thing that there was one process for the browser as a whole and one browser per tab for page specific processing and then separate processes for plug ins. AFAIK they've only managed to get the last thing done. Which is why I wonder how they can expect to be taken seriously when they keep leaving things half done to work on things that nobody wants them to do. Such as all those asinine UI improvements, the awesomebar is great, but most of the rest of it makes me want to find anew browser.

Too bad for others by fluffythedestroyer · 2012-07-07 03:26 · Score: 1

I left ie cause of known problems. I got sick of it, I went with firefox and I was happy for a bit until the memory leak started to puke all over my system. Then I went with Chrome and I'm happy with it performance. This benchmark wont make me go with firefox or ie back again even if they got their act straight up. reason is simple, they got the change to fix these problems in the first place and they didn't listen to it's users and continued to release their products with those problems... too bad for them. Besides, I'm happy with Chrome.

Re:Too bad for others by Shikaku · 2012-07-07 03:37 · Score: 1

So what you're saying is, you're entitled to fixes NOW, not later? Thanks for letting us know, enjoy your browser hopping.
Re:Too bad for others by r1348 · 2012-07-07 03:38 · Score: 3, Insightful

You assume that those memory management problems were both easy to spot and fix. They weren't.
Kudos for the Firefox devs for finally improving the memory usage situation.
Re:Too bad for others by gl4ss · 2012-07-07 03:42 · Score: 2

You assume that those memory management problems were both easy to spot and fix. They weren't.
Kudos for the Firefox devs for finally improving the memory usage situation.
why was it still pushed to stable branch then? (I use firefox though, never had too bad memory problems with it and it hasn't crashed in ages).

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Re:Too bad for others by icebike · 2012-07-07 04:10 · Score: 4, Insightful

No, he's saying that a screw up long ago prevents him from ever looking at it again.
Its the old "cut off your nose to spite your face method" of software selection. There is no redemption in some people's eyes.

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Re:Too bad for others by icebike · 2012-07-07 04:20 · Score: 1

why was it still pushed to stable branch then? (I use firefox though, never had too bad memory problems with it and it hasn't crashed in ages).
Congrats, you answered your question in the same sentence you asked it.
For the vast majority of people, most never saw the leaks, because they use a browser , then exit it, and do other work. The OS recovers all the leaked memory at that time.
But some people only know how to use a browser, and that is all the do on a computer. (facebook junkies mostly). They fire it up, and stay there for hours on end. Leaks matter to these people only when their machine slows down (Most are not computer literate enough to detect a leak until it gets rather large).

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Re:Too bad for others by Korin43 · 2012-07-07 04:23 · Score: 4, Informative

For anyone who's actually interested, the Memshrink Blog is a fascinating account of how a team of developers have been reducing Firefox's memory usage. Interestingly, Firefox's memory usage has never been particularly bad (it just seems to be because web pages are so much more complicated), but addons have had horrible memory problems for a long time (and unfortunately, that's pretty hard to detect).
Re:Too bad for others by arth1 · 2012-07-07 04:58 · Score: 1

But some people only know how to use a browser, and that is all the do on a computer. (facebook junkies mostly). They fire it up, and stay there for hours on end.
Weeks, even. Some people use a browser for everything, including documents and e-mail, and never close it. Sleep and hibernate are godsends for them, because they don't have to restart their browser ever.
They also tend to run with a blown up window with tabs doing the job of the taskbar - if it wasn't for the clock, they might as well run in kiosk mode.
Personally, I don't use tabs much - I prefer separate windows, so I can do things like cut and paste between them without losing focus. My taskbar provides me with a list of browser windows, so I don't have to waste precious vertical space on a tab bar.
Re:Too bad for others by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 05:03 · Score: 0

Maybe he is saying "Besides, I'm happy with Chrome"? Maybe logical people need a real reason to switch when they find something The Just Works(tm) for them?

Don't be a little fanboi, crying that someone doesn't want to be bothered with your browser when they're happy with where they're at today.
Re:Too bad for others by vlueboy · 2012-07-07 05:47 · Score: 1

There's also the idea that people blacklist applications just like they boycott companies like SONY, Ford, presidents, and certain religious groups.
Choice is a right not always given to people like him, you know? Remember the days of all-Netscape, all-the-time under Unix machines in the nineties?
Re:Too bad for others by Johann+Lau · 2012-07-07 07:47 · Score: 1

We really should start paying attention to memory footprint .. of web pages! We know wasting bandwidth is bad, we know hogging too much CPU is bad, both of these things are easily noticeable when they become extreme; but we don't even have good tools to watch (peak) memory consumption of individual web pages, and to see what elements in it use how much. That kinda sucks.
Re:Too bad for others by Sigma+7 · 2012-07-07 10:19 · Score: 1

With Firefox, it's not the memory footprint of pages. Rather, it's the memory footprint of Javascript going out of control.
I had Indie Gala idle in the background, and it eventually built up ~1GB of memory use in Javascript compartments. I see no physical reason in the page why it should take up that much memory.
Re:Too bad for others by Billly+Gates · 2012-07-07 11:14 · Score: 1

A large reason is JQuery which has become popular and other bloated frameworks. Older browsers like IE 6 were such a pain to code for that developers starting using these and the all so lovely facebook like scripts and every other ad analytic service to increase the revenue.
Multiply that per tab and it adds up. Worse many in corporate America who refuse to leave XP wont upgrade and claim their 512 meg machines run just fine. They just blame whatever browser for being ram hungry instead

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Re:Too bad for others by keeboo · 2012-07-07 11:36 · Score: 1

But some people only know how to use a browser, and that is all the do on a computer. (facebook junkies mostly). They fire it up, and stay there for hours on end. Leaks matter to these people only when their machine slows down (Most are not computer literate enough to detect a leak until it gets rather large).
I believe I know a bit more that just using the browser (my first computer had a - then - competent Z80A processor, just to give you a hint --- but who knows, I may be a shameless liar who was a kid when Windows 2000 came in).
And, yes, I have quite a few openened browser windows (today 8, typically 3-4), each with lots os tabs (average: 15? I'm not feeling like counting).

Why do I keep that stuff opened all the time? Because I already leave my machine 24/7 on processing XYZ (usually research-related tests before sending that to a cluster for the real job + the fact I find the fact I may access may computer-and-its-data anywhere anytime very, very, convenient).
Still, that does not explain why the browser is running (why not closing the app before going out?). The reason for that is that I like the convenience of, when returning home, to be able to resume whatever I was looking for / researching on the web. My memory (self, biological sense) is not that great, and it helps me a lot when I minimize the level of intellectual noise so I can focus on what really matters.
Is that a processing waste? Technically, yes, but I do not care. The computer is supposed to serve me (and that includes my quirky habits), not the other way around. Talk to me about computing performance where it really matters, not on my personal computer.

The browser is Chrome, which I use for everything except online banking and certain sensitive accounts. Great browser, its process-per-tab structure works really well to take advantage of my 4-core processor, unlike Firefox (unless something changed? I would love a process-per-tab Firefox).
Back to Chrome: the browser is great and stuff, but it eats a lot of memory. With my previous 4GB RAM I had a miserable life (swap all the time) after a certain point of Chrome upgrades. It seems that the situation only got worse after each new version.

Eventually I upgraded the motherboard and its memory (the processor was fine and stayed) so I got 16GB. And I bought that because it was not worth my time changing my behavior to adapt to my machine's limitations.
Chrome performance improved dramatically, life was beautiful again, then able to go back to things that really mattered etc etc. Still, during some heaving browsing (I like to leave N papers simultaneously opened so I can go from one to another as I like, okay?) I noticed that the CPU consumption increased as well. Do you know when it feels like the software is taxing the memory and CPU caches? Well, exactly that.

I like Chrome, but it became bloated rather quickly (around the 2-digit versions, perhaps?). It was lean and elegant, now it feels just... adequate. And it's not like I really changed my browsing patterns, the thing became a fat pig (well, a multi-process pig, what minimizes the issue a bit). A pity, comparing to the early Chrome versions.

Really, the only thing keeping me from going back to Firefox is its lack of (useful, at least) multi processing. The issue that drove me to Chrome to begin with.
Re:Too bad for others by Korin43 · 2012-07-08 04:22 · Score: 1

In Firefox, you can see the current memory usage of a page by going to about:memory. I'd argue that peak memory isn't that interesting, since using a huge amount for a tiny amount of time is unimportant; it's the sustained high usage which is annoying.
Re:Too bad for others by Johann+Lau · 2012-07-08 07:06 · Score: 1

In Firefox, you can see the current memory usage of a page by going to about:memory.
You can see all sorts of confusing and unexplained stuff there, but for the whole of Firefox, not individual web pages... !
And yes, peak is interesting, certainly as webpage author, anything that can help debug is. That is, you'd expect it to be "not interesting" until something is up with it, and then it's highly interesting. Right now there isn't even a way to tell. Oh, and if something on your system used all memory for 0.0001 seconds every 20 seconds, it would kill all your caches.. it just wouldn't be as bad as using it all the time and grinding the machine to a halt, but that's hardly a consolation.
But more important would be what elements *in* a page use how much memory. How much do the DOMs of 200 .svg images weigh? What resources are reused, and what are allocated multiple times, when using the same icon a 100 times on one page? I don't know! I don't even know if it matters, but to find that out, we need the tools.

more information on firefox by cyfer2000 · 2012-07-07 03:35 · Score: 4, Informative

there is a website called are we slim yet tracking the memory usage of firefox.

--
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.

Re:more information on firefox by AmiMoJo · 2012-07-07 03:58 · Score: 5, Interesting

This obsession with memory use is wrecking Firefox. Chrome is much, much faster and I prefer to trade memory for performance.
Firefox does stupid things like delaying image decoding until the image is on screen, making the whole browser stutter like crazy. I turn that off because the reason my computer has lots of ram is to avoid that. Can't they even detect when you have lots of free RAM and make use of it? Of course not, that would make FF look bad in pointless benchmarks.

--
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Re:more information on firefox by FooBarWidget · 2012-07-07 04:14 · Score: 1

They do that because the users with 300 tabs open and users who are on Pentium II with 512 MB RAM complain about memory usage.
Re:more information on firefox by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 04:19 · Score: 0

Where is the setting to turn that off?
Re:more information on firefox by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 04:24 · Score: 4, Informative

This. Mod up.
The stuttering behaviour became extra prevalent starting with Firefox 13 (for me anyway). Sites like Amazon would cause the browser to stutter while trying to scroll through content before images were loaded. A complete uninstall + clean + reinstall of FF13 didn't help. Rolling back to FF12 worked fine. Disk = Intel 510-series SSD, under AHCI on Windows XP SP3. Moving my FF cache to a MHDD did not improve things either, so it's not disk I/O which is was the cause.
I then tried Chrome. Holy *shit* that thing is fast, and I don't just mean loading pages -- I'm talking about interactivity/responsiveness within the browser (for keystrokes, mouse clicks, etc.) too. What I didn't like about Chrome: 1. tab-only (I do not like tabs, and have tried many times to use them but just cannot do it), 2. its lets-fork-a-new-process model (which is part of its original design from the very beginning) makes it very hard to tolerate when using Task Manager (yes I know Chrome has its own internal "manager" that can let you kill off a specific tab/page), 3. quite possibly the worst Configuration page/setup I've ever seen, with lots and lots of adjustments missing, and finally 4. a non-user-friendly bookmark interface (lots of Chrome users complain about this and state hands down that Firefox does this a lot better. The biggest ding against Chrome was when they removed the Bookmark button/icon so now you have to go through 3-4 clicks to expand your bookmarks). Back to Firefox I went...
The memory bloat problem in FF is real, but a lot of it has to do with how people use their browser. Most of my colleagues do insane shit like load up 20 tabs on launch and leave those open at all times. Who the fuck uses a computer like that? Oh, wait... well, I certainly don't. Many of those pages my colleagues load use Flash, lots of Javascript, etc.. One even loads 6-7 tabs filled with stock-ticker-esque pages; yeah, those are going to be real CPU and memory friendly. You can even see evidence of this here on Slashdot; "Who in the name of satan has 40 tabs open? *checks tabs* Guilty as charged m'lord". Stop abusing your computer!
As I see it, the biggest complaints about memory usage seem to be coming from a demographic of people who aren't using their system in a resource-friendly manner. People leave their browsers open for days, sometimes a full week. I'm a system administrator -- when I'm done with something, I close it. Same goes with memory management: when you're done with something, free() it. Folks over the years have tried hard to argue with me about this point ("no, a good garbage collector.........") -- all bullshit. Every GC on the planet is shit. Free memory when you're done with it, and use threads (preferably on an OS where userland threads map more or less 1:1 to a kernel thread, and use a programming language where this thread model exists (e.g. not Ruby!)) so that allocations can be freed when the thread ends. This isn't rocket science; KISS principle all the way.
It would greatly benefit everyone if they learned be a little more conscientious of how to use a computer in a resource-friendly way. Otherwise we're doing the exact thing that can never be achieved: trying to solve social problems (usage behaviour) with technology. It never works.
Re:more information on firefox by arth1 · 2012-07-07 05:04 · Score: 1

This obsession with memory use is wrecking Firefox. Chrome is much, much faster and I prefer to trade memory for performance.
So do I. System performance, that is, not single app performance.
Both the OS and I do more than one thing at a time, and I don't play the game of robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Re:more information on firefox by hackertourist · 2012-07-07 05:23 · Score: 5, Insightful

As I see it, the biggest complaints about memory usage seem to be coming from a demographic of people who aren't using their system in a resource-friendly manner.

People should not need to do that. Quit trying to force me to adapt to the machine instead of the other way round. This isn't a Sinclair Spectrum, it should be able to handle 40 tabs without crashing or filling up all my RAM.
Re:more information on firefox by VMSBIGOT · 2012-07-07 05:32 · Score: 2

It just sucks there is no way to find out how much RAM/Virtual memory there is via the OS. No, wait....
Games have been able to figure out recommended settings based on hardware configuration for well over a decade at least.
Re:more information on firefox by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 05:36 · Score: 0

So you want me to close my browser at the end of every day?
Why would I do that? Why should I use my computer in a resource friendly manner?
If I open up 40 tabs, I have a reason for wanting 40 tabs open.
If firefox can't handle it because my computer sucks, that's fine.
But if other browsers are able to handle it then firefox should fix it, which is exactly what they are doing.
Your free argument makes no sense either.
If the programmers free everything properly, then there should be no problem with me opening up a bunch of tabs and leaving firefox on for a month.
I expect my OS to survive more than a day of uptime, why not my browser?
If someone told you to just reboot your system because it was running low on memory you would tell them to fuck off.
Re:more information on firefox by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 06:17 · Score: 0

If you think Firefox 13 is bad wait until you see 14. It is a complete disaster and just stops loading pages after an hours use. The only solution is to close Firefox 14 and restart it. I finally gave up on the beta channel and reloaded Firefox 12. It works much better. Slashdot no longer loads twice, Google Voice has no error on starting, and Hipmunk works again.
Is there just too much emphasis on these performance tests and speed tricks? Or have too many good programmers left Mozilla?
Re:more information on firefox by MrEricSir · 2012-07-07 08:29 · Score: 1

If someone told you to just reboot your system because it was running low on memory you would tell them to fuck off.
Consumer level operating systems took decades to get to the point where one program couldn't bring down the entire OS. Web browsers are still relatively new, and the underlying standards are in a constant state of flux. Javascript went from something you'd use for little effects to a language for building sophisticated applications.
Eventually the day will arrive when browsers are heavily optimized and fast, but we're just not there yet. Have patience.

--
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Re:more information on firefox by AmiMoJo · 2012-07-07 09:00 · Score: 1

This isn't a Sinclair Spectrum, it should be able to handle 40 tabs without crashing or filling up all my RAM.
No, it should fill up your RAM. Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Normally the OS will use spare RAM for disk caching, but apps like Firefox should make use of it and release it when other apps need it. Benchmarks only look at the number seen in the Task Manager though, so Firefox goes to ridiculous lengths to reduce it at the cost of performance.

--
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Re:more information on firefox by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 09:41 · Score: 0

As I see it, the biggest complaints about memory usage seem to be coming from a demographic of people who aren't using their system in a resource-friendly manner. People leave their browsers open for days, sometimes a full week.
The problem being... what exactly? I remember the days when it was just a dream that you could leave applications up for days or weeks at a time. Now that that ability is here, you want to go back?

I'm a system administrator -- when I'm done with something, I close it. Same goes with memory management: when you're done with something, free() it.
Good for you. You keep on closing tabs when you don't need them any more. Guess memory management won't be a problem for you, then. Us poor chaps that don't do that will just have to keep suffering. Oh the misery. OH, THE MISERY.
I mean, idiots that we are, we wouldn't have a clue why performance fell off a cliff when we have 100 windows open. Thanks for enlightening us. We'll be sure to be done with things sooner in the future, so that we can better emulate the pinnacle of computing evolution, the system administrator.
With this newfound wisdom, I may just start a school, so that I can share it with those less fortunate. We are forever indebted to you for showing us the error of our ways.
Re:more information on firefox by bertok · 2012-07-07 12:32 · Score: 1

It's not always so straight-forward.
For example, Terminal Servers may have 48 GB of memory or more, but each user only has 200-400 MB of that allocated for all applications.
In environments like those, being memory efficient is suddenly critical!
Re:more information on firefox by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 13:49 · Score: 0

> Bookmark button/icon so now you have to go through 3-4 clicks to expand your bookmarks)
WTF are you talking about? Click the star in the URL bar -> bookmark menu pops up.
Re:more information on firefox by Waccoon · 2012-07-07 16:45 · Score: 1

Agreed. Ever since 3.6, every time I've updated Firefox it only gets slower and the regular freezes keep getting longer. Extensions like Session Manager don't seem to work at all for me, despite many claims to the contrary.
Forget memory usage and leaks. It's the memory manager that needs an overhaul, and in that department, they seem to be doing nothing.
Thankfully I never became addicted to tabs and use an old-fashioned HTML file as my homepage instead. Regularly restarting Firefox makes the browser usable. I can't imagine keeping the browser open for days on end like other people do.
Re:more information on firefox by swillden · 2012-07-07 16:45 · Score: 1

1. tab-only (I do not like tabs, and have tried many times to use them but just cannot do it),[...] 4. a non-user-friendly bookmark interface
These are related. The expected way to use bookmarks in Chrome is tightly tied to tabbed browsing. When you open a new, empty tab, you're shown your bookmarks at the top of the empty page, ready to use. If you like tabs (I do), this is very slick. Control-T to open a tab, then click the bookmark you want.

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Re:more information on firefox by del_diablo · 2012-07-08 00:19 · Score: 1

Disk caching died with 2 gigs of RAM becoming the lowest common determinator, and its currently 4 gigs.
Re:more information on firefox by Unkl_Shvelven · 2012-07-08 03:37 · Score: 1

Where is the setting to turn that off?
Go to about:config and set image.mem.decodeondraw to false.

--
regular man whom love computer (Also, fuck beta).
Re:more information on firefox by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-08 13:38 · Score: 0

WTF are you talking about? The "star" you're talking about does not pop up a bookmarks menu, it pops up the ability to add the URL to your bookmarks. This is effectively what you get as of Google Chrome 20.0.1132.47m:
http://www.technipages.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Chrome-save-new-bookmark.png
While this is what I was referring to, re: how to access your bookmarks menu, and how the --bookmarks-menu flag was removed:
http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/07/02/google-chrome-bookmark-menu-drop-down/
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/chromium-discuss/d2FEBGdVKv0
Presently in Chrome, the menu I'm referring to requires you to:
1. Click on the wrench icon
2. Scroll down to Bookmarks
3. Click on the Bookmarks menu entry (or wait for it to expand)
4. There's all your bookmarks; pick one.
So that's 3 clicks, or 2 if you choose wait-to-expand.
Don't mention the "Bookmarks Bar" because that DOES NOT provide a menu interface of all your bookmarks. People in the aforementioned threads also complained about this. There are "hacks" you can do to add a bookmark to your bookmark bar that results in a bookmark menu (recursive anyone?), but as I said that's a horrible hack for something that used to Just Work(tm) until it was removed.
After the removal of --bookmarks-menu, there was an extension called "Neat Bookmarks" which did what people wanted. However, it turns out that extension was spying on people and Google quickly removed it from their extensions store. Here's the analysis that lead to its removal:
http://stopmalvertising.com/malvertisements/beware-of-the-google-chrome-extension-neat-bookmarks.html
"Neat Bookmarks" looked like this (very Firefox-like, yes?):
http://www.ghacks.net/2010/10/17/neat-bookmarks-for-chrome-search-and-access-bookmarks-faster/
Furthermore, Google apparently keeps moving the "bookmark this page" star you refer to:
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/KPW3FwZkd0Q
I'll keep piling on the evidence if this isn't sufficient...

RAM Usage by deathtopaulw · 2012-07-07 03:38 · Score: 3, Insightful

I know it's now cool to backlash against chrome users when they talk about "memory usage" but they're simply just using the wrong phrase. YES chrome uses more actual bytes of memory and always has, but what it does with that memory makes it work so much faster than Firefox. Typical idiot vernacular causes you to say "firefox uses more memory" when in fact what they mean is "it is slower and less responsive."

Let's get a grip here people, it's 2012. If your computer doesn't have 4-8 gigs of ddr3 ram, you're doing it wrong. Chrome is allowed to use as much memory as it wants as long as it gets the job done better than anyone else.

Re:RAM Usage by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 03:42 · Score: 0, Funny

The job being, providing your browsing habits to google in the most efficient way possible.
Re:RAM Usage by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 05:11 · Score: 0

You hit the nail on the head. Firefox's big problem has always been UI responsiveness. The menu functions still have a very noticeable lag to them, something which is not acceptable in this day-and-age. It just *feels* slow.
I found it interesting that Firefox Mobile dumps the whole "XUL" javascript UI idea. This, despite the fact a modern cellphone is a much faster computer than the machine we used to run those old Mozilla betas on. Perhaps they're half-way into admitting that it never could be made to work correctly?
Re:RAM Usage by Billly+Gates · 2012-07-07 10:21 · Score: 1

I know it's now cool to backlash against chrome users when they talk about "memory usage" but they're simply just using the wrong phrase. YES chrome uses more actual bytes of memory and always has, but what it does with that memory makes it work so much faster than Firefox. Typical idiot vernacular causes you to say "firefox uses more memory" when in fact what they mean is "it is slower and less responsive."
Let's get a grip here people, it's 2012. If your computer doesn't have 4-8 gigs of ddr3 ram, you're doing it wrong. Chrome is allowed to use as much memory as it wants as long as it gets the job done better than anyone else.
I posted this story because I was tired of people repeating that over and over on how bloated FF is when they have not used it since version 4. It is time to clean the air up on this.
But until very recently that was true. Firefox 4 and even slashdot's beloved FF 3.6 are really crappy browsers. I just installed FF 3.6 on a VM because I am working on a site that is business oriented and corporations have not moved off it yet. WHAT A DIFFERENCE. It was slow and hogged the hard drive and just moving the up and down arrows did slow redraws. It was painful.
Early last year I even caught myself using IE 8 as I found it faster and smoother. Yes, it is a bad browser too with numerous rendering issues. 2010 - 2011 was when CHrome starting to become popular and it was a breath of fresh air.
FF is now catching up to Chrome, but historically for the last 2 years Chrome has always been lean and mean and could run circles around FF. Mozilla needed to fix the memory issue as slashdotters such as cpu6502 always complain even with FF 13 that his 512 ram system comes to a slowdown as well as most of corporate America who still own ancient XP systems and refuse to upgrade as they all work just fine.
These corporations when they need IE 6 for intranet sites use FF 3.6 for external web ones and it is painfully slow on such systems.

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http://saveie6.com/
Re:RAM Usage by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 13:03 · Score: 0

Let's get a grip here people, it's 2012. If your computer doesn't have 4-8 gigs of ddr3 ram, you're doing it wrong.
or you own a laptop that's more than 18 months old, or you have a low-end netbook.
But part of the problem is that there's no way to mark bits of memory as, "I really need this to stay in RAM" "It would be nice to keep this in RAM" and "It's faster to rebuild this than to load it from a swap file, you can have it, but let me know if you take it, and don't bother saving it to swap" and probably other things that are even more useful that I didn't think of.
Re:RAM Usage by Raenex · 2012-07-07 14:05 · Score: 1

I just installed FF 3.6 on a VM because I am working on a site that is business oriented and corporations have not moved off it yet. WHAT A DIFFERENCE. It was slow and hogged the hard drive and just moving the up and down arrows did slow redraws. It was painful.
That sounds more like a configuration issue with your VM than a Firefox 3.6 problem. Try running the latest Firefox in the same VM and report back.
I don't recall 3.6 being as slow as you describe. Generally, I've been happy with Firefox performance, but I do run with NoScript turned on by default so I haven't been bit by the worst Flash and JavaScript problems.
Re:RAM Usage by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 21:18 · Score: 0

Sorry, but my crap Corporate Desktop Runs xp with 2gb of RAM and a stupid mcaffee taking up 200mb of RAM already. Add eclipse at about a gig+ and the software I have to develop will take another 300+ when run. Now add 600+ for oracle xe. Guess where that leaves the room for the browser to test the webapp I am writing?
Re:RAM Usage by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-08 03:04 · Score: 0

I know it's now cool to backlash against chrome users when they talk about "memory usage" but they're simply just using the wrong phrase. YES chrome uses more actual bytes of memory and always has, but what it does with that memory makes it work so much faster than Firefox. Typical idiot vernacular causes you to say "firefox uses more memory" when in fact what they mean is "it is slower and less responsive."
That is the most blatant example No True Scotsman / Goal Post Moving I've seen in a while, and you got an Insightful for it!
Let's rephrase shall we: "Chrome users used to say that it had better memory usage than Firefox, that is no longer true. Chrome is much worse than Firefox now, so Chrome users should now pretend they were actually talking about "performance" when they said "memory usage" by torturing the definition of those words."
You could just admit that Firefox isn't a bad browser any more and there's no point switching away from it to Chrome just because of memory/performance concerns, but that would too reasonable.

Let's get a grip here people, it's 2012. If your computer doesn't have 4-8 gigs of ddr3 ram, you're doing it wrong. Chrome is allowed to use as much memory as it wants as long as it gets the job done better than anyone else.
Does Google pay you to write that? Or is it just buyer's remorse trying to justify it?
Chrome uses more memory (Especially due to it's split process design, it has to duplicate the program's global data for each tab), that's just an artefact of the way Chrome works. Stop trying to hand wave it away.
/written in Chrome (1GiB memory for 20 tabs across 3 windows. I also have a Firefox (772MiB) with 60 tabs across 5 windows)

Surprisingly? No. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 03:38 · Score: 0, Informative

Chrome runs each tab in a separate process, this means the entire memory space of the browser is copied to each tab.

A browser that runs each tab as it's own thread never copies the memory space. Even if I run the 64-bit version of Firefox in parallel with 32-bit Chrome, on the same tabs, Chrome is chewing up 2-3x more memory. The only way we'll see an end to this is if Google heel-face-turn's on the "one tab, one process" ass backwards tabbing model.

I should mention that anything that crashes the main thread, crashes all the tabs anyways, so all that Google's engineers managed to do was make it so that you have more processes that can crash. I've been having nothing but this kind of crashing problem... where the main process pauses due to activity in the taskbar and stops responding for a minute or two. Only Chrome is doing this on Windows.

Maybe's Chrome's reached a tipping point of stupid innovations and it's time to go back to Firefox with it's more conservative memory usage.

MSIE isn't too bad, but it's always two steps behind Firefox.

Re:Surprisingly? No. by mister_playboy · 2012-07-07 03:57 · Score: 1

I should mention that anything that crashes the main thread, crashes all the tabs anyways, so all that Google's engineers managed to do was make it so that you have more processes that can crash.
I don't use Chromium too often, but when I do use it I see many zombie processes... apparently a side effect of the way they handle tabs.
This is on Arch Linux.

--
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law ::: Love is the law, love under will
Re:Surprisingly? No. by akeeneye · 2012-07-07 04:04 · Score: 1
Caveat: I have no detailed knowledge of the Chrome architecture. That said:
1. I rather doubt that the tab processes are forks of the entire browser. I expect that that the main process execs tab processes as needed. On my system I see one big (virtual mem) chromium-browser process and a number of much smaller child processes of that.
2. Shared memory. All of the tab processes should be sharing their code pages at minimum. Kernel geeks, correct me if I'm wrong on that.
So no, the resident memory usage of Chrome is not going to be sizeof(Chrome main process) * number_of_tabs_open.
--
The man who dies rich dies disgraced. -- Andrew Carnegie

Does mem usage in tabs matter? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 03:39 · Score: 0

When every computer now comes with at least 3-4 gb of ram, who cares if a program uses 1.5 gigs?

Also, if you're using 40 tabs at once... well, then the obvious question arises: What are you doing that requires all those tabs to be open?

I don't think most normals have 40 tabs open at once.

Re:Does mem usage in tabs matter? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 04:39 · Score: 1

When every computer now comes with at least 3-4 gb of ram, who cares if a program uses 1.5 gigs?
The seventies called and asked if we can have more than one process running. I would've told them yes, we've been multitasking for years, but after your statement I'm not so sure anymore.
Re:Does mem usage in tabs matter? by arth1 · 2012-07-07 05:15 · Score: 1

When every computer now comes with at least 3-4 gb of ram, who cares if a program uses 1.5 gigs?
The user who have lots of programs running?
Currently, I have a TV window, a music player (Fred Astaire), a weather app and a clock, two browser windows, three terminal windows, and an instant messenger window, and a virtual machine.
In the background, a backup is running.
I have 8 GB of RAM, and severely dislike it when my browser assumes that it can use as much as is "available" - it's available because I have aggressive caching policies, so the OS can have free memory for disk caching, not so the browser can be a greedy bloated prick that doesn't care about what else is running.
Firefox' behavior was so bad that I started running it under a cgroup to limit it. That's an option most users won't even have.

Performance improvements by jaak · 2012-07-07 03:40 · Score: 5, Funny

Interestingly enough, the Tom's Hardware pages-per-article benchmark shows that Firefox can now handle an article spread over twice as many pages as before!

Re:Performance improvements by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 04:01 · Score: 1

Interestingly enough, the Tom's Hardware pages-per-article benchmark shows that Firefox can now handle an article spread over twice as many pages as before!
That's one area where Safari, the lowest scoring browser (in these Windows-based tests, natch) wins the day. It effectively has Readability built in, so it's one click to strip ads and consolidate pages.
For the rest, there's, well, Readability.

Not really surprising ... by richg74 · 2012-07-07 03:41 · Score: 1

Firefox 13.01 uses the least amount of RAM with 40 tabs opened, while Chrome uses the highest (surprisingly).

It's really not that surprising. If Firefox has cleaned up its act, then Chrome would tend to be at least a bit higher because of its "process per tab" design. Similarly, IE is likely to show lower usage, because parts of it are probably counted as part of the Windows OS.

Re:Not really surprising ... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 03:45 · Score: 0

Yeah, Firefox has been aiming to replace Chrome on the minimalist frontier for some time now. They have stripped the browser to the barebones, moving everything into extensions, then switched to rapid release breaking those extensions, allowing them to become a very slim browser. Meanwhile, Chrome has developed a lot, and it almost looks like an actual browser now, which has its cost in resources. The two have basically switched places.
Re:Not really surprising ... by Korin43 · 2012-07-07 04:28 · Score: 1

They have stripped the browser to the barebones, moving everything into extensions
Uh what? I can't even figure out what you're claiming they took out.

40 tabs? by trancemission · 2012-07-07 03:42 · Score: 5, Funny

Who in the name of satan has 40 tabs open?!?

*checks tabs*

Guilty as charged m'lord..........

Re:40 tabs? by antdude · 2012-07-07 08:06 · Score: 1

Heh, I am bad too and I do them in Mozilla's SeaMonkey v2.0.14 web browser. :O

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Re:40 tabs? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 09:15 · Score: 0

only 40? If I'm at less than 80, then I've had an unexpected restart recently. I've an Opera session going since 09 with 250+ tabs open.
And here's my look at benchmarking them a month ago - http://www.ktetch.co.uk/2012/06/firefox-13-windows7-shootout.html (I'd use my name, but i'm on a public terminal and don't wahttp://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/07/07/1452211/firefox-notably-improved-in-toms-hardwares-latest-browser-showdown#nt to log into email
Re:40 tabs? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-08 03:41 · Score: 0

Humph, you're a lightweight. I regularly run 250+ tabs (I'm trying to slim down and I'm down from 400+). Chrome starts choking after a dozen or so. Firefox handles it fine.

Firefox is over by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 03:43 · Score: 0

Okay so Firefox is a tad faster, uses a little less memory and I use it everyday thanks guys.

That said it also sucks shit.

It never closes properly. Do not ask me how many times I've closed it to reopen it only to find it saying "only one instance can run at a time".
I'm a developer so I'll be nice, but I see it regularly use up to 2 gigs of ram with just two tabs open.
The only thing Firefox has going for it now are the plugins for developers and they are constantly breaking those, apparently a stable API isn't their forte.

Firefox is on the way out, I wouldn't suggest Firefox to anyone who wasn't a developer at this point and even then it would come with gripes.

Firefox not currently.... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 03:43 · Score: 0

complete crap.

It works as a browser quite well at the moment. The fact that I'm both surprised and happy that a browser allows you to browse must say something. I still have a number of gripes I won't bore you with but browsing, stability and speed are not complete crap.

ff is sold in favor of chrome by Faisal+Rehman · 2012-07-07 03:44 · Score: 0

The performance is slowest in ff/iceweasel after adding popular addons. Javascript engine is full of bugs. In linux, ff hangs by closing tab. It also forgets thumbnail of websites in new tab page. The fact is mozilla has sold ff to google as chrome and want to kill it.

Re:ff is sold in favor of chrome by oakgrove · 2012-07-07 04:03 · Score: 1

I just tested your theory in Firefox on Ubuntu 12.04 and neither of what are saying happened. maybe Firefox isn't your problem.

--
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Re:ff is sold in favor of chrome by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 04:27 · Score: 0

That's an interesting conspiracy theory but it bears no merit. In fact chromium is based on the same codebase as konqueror which is why the html performance doesn't approach that of Firefox. Chrome isn't open source so nobody really knows what it contains that isn't in chromium but it's commonly accepted that the only difference is the addition of google's botnet code.
Re:ff is sold in favor of chrome by Faisal+Rehman · 2012-07-07 06:20 · Score: 1

may be you are using old version. check ff13.0.1
Re:ff is sold in favor of chrome by Teun · 2012-07-07 10:01 · Score: 1

That's what I am using and I don't see your issues...

--
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."

cpu usage by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 03:45 · Score: 0

until I updated my nvidia driver to the latest backported version, iceweasel 13 was using 50% of my 2.8GHz dual-dore when idle
on a text only page.

Your opinion may differ by trifish · 2012-07-07 03:46 · Score: 5, Interesting

What I care about in a browser is (in order of importance) security, compatibility, reliability, speed.

I stopped examining RAM usage of any software since the time I bought 16GB of RAM for practically no money.

Even before, when I had "only" 4GB of RAM, I had swap file turned off for years and I haven't seen a single "Insufficient RAM" error.

Re:Your opinion may differ by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 04:20 · Score: 0

Same here only difference: I haven't bothered with the 16GB, what's the point? Unless you're running 32bit editing or cad software?
Re:Your opinion may differ by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 04:57 · Score: 0

I've also been swapless for years and have 16GB of RAM. That still doesn't mean it's reasonable for firefox to use 2GB of it after browsing youtube for an hour. I've got a large part of my system running out of tmpfs, and I can't have processes running amok with memory.
Re:Your opinion may differ by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 15:40 · Score: 0

I wouldn't do that. Paging frees up stale application pages from memory and lets the OS use them for more productive things... like caching disk/network IO and prefetching other files that are commonly used.
Don't take my word for it-- try Mark Russinovich (who's likely forgot more about Windows than most people know).
"Some feel having no paging file results in better performance, but in general, having a paging file means Windows can write pages on the modified list (which represent pages that aren’t being accessed actively but have not been saved to disk) out to the paging file, thus making that memory available for more useful purposes (processes or file cache). So while there may be some workloads that perform better with no paging file, in general having one will mean more usable memory being available to the system (never mind that Windows won’t be able to write kernel crash dumps without a paging file sized large enough to hold them)."
http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/11/17/3155406.aspx
Why you shouldn't: http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it

we give a fuck by anared · 2012-07-07 03:47 · Score: 1

Those of us who like a realiable and well working browser?

Re:we give a fuck by fitteschleiker · 2012-07-07 03:49 · Score: 0

nothing to do with reliability or "well-working-ness"
Re:we give a fuck by anared · 2012-07-07 10:14 · Score: 1

memory leaks dont?

Re:who gives a fuck by tsa · 2012-07-07 03:52 · Score: 1, Funny

Because many /. geeks are poor people?

--

-- Cheers!

What the summary did not include by trifish · 2012-07-07 03:53 · Score: 5, Informative

The summary elegantly avoided the most important metric - Page Load Time. Ok, so let's see how we're doing there:

IE9 - fastest
Safari - 2nd
Chrome - 3rd
Firefox - 4th
Opera - 5th

The page load time tests are the same eight pages in our startup time tests: Google, YouTube, Yahoo!, Amazon, Wikipedia, craigslist, eBay, and Wikipedia.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-chrome-20-firefox-13-opera-12,3228-6.html

Re:What the summary did not include by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 04:20 · Score: 5, Insightful

Is there anything of value to comment on when the page load times are so close to each other on all the browsers excepting the last? The first 4 finishers range from 880ms to 947ms, which is less than a 10% differential across 8 websites. I doubt you'd notice any difference in your day-to-day real life browsing with respect to page load times.
Re:What the summary did not include by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 05:13 · Score: 0

noone cares about page loading times.
they depend solely on your internet connection.
Re:What the summary did not include by splorp! · 2012-07-07 05:39 · Score: 1

Google does.

--
Please don't humanize the morons around me. It makes me very uncomfortable.
Re:What the summary did not include by dingen · 2012-07-07 05:43 · Score: 2

Then again, saving 100 ms for opening 20 pages a day for a million users means you save whole man-month each year!

--
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Re:What the summary did not include by jmerlin · 2012-07-07 08:30 · Score: 1

This is misleading, both in the benchmarks but also here. I very much dislike this entire article because it's very inaccurate and doesn't attempt to explain why certain things are the way they are. For instance, you have 2 categories where IE magically rapes Chrome and Firefox. Firefox and Chrome get near daily updates and have engineers who are obsessed with making every little thing as fast as possible. Chrome even uses Webkit, which is developed just as fervently at Apple. Microsoft rarely updates Trident or JScript. It is illogical given the resources and the amount of work invested that you would assume a test that shows IE9 (not even IE10) outperforming either of these browsers significantly is an accurate test. Even worse, the article combines unrelated categories of tests into a composite score.

For load speed - we don't know how this was measured. It isn't mentioned. Is it measured by the browser's own tools? IE may trigger a "done loading" right after it performs a layout of the DOM. Unless you know that the browsers are consistent with the metric being used, they don't matter. IE has routinely screwed up things like event fire order in order to "improve performance" but really all it does is break something that works in every other browser. I am not satisfied that the same has not occurred here. And if you come at it logically, Firefox and Chrome have much more powerful CSS and HTML rendering engines. Those websites where IE9 scored significantly higher have an HTML5 doctype. So you're also comparing nearly fully-compliant HTML5 browsers against an HTML4 browser. What's worse, is that if you look at cached load time, which is, as you state, THE MOST IMPORTANT METRIC, Chrome wins hands down and Firefox is better than IE. The fact that it changes so dramatically when caching is introduced implies that the metric being used in an uncached test is favorable to IE, which likely stems from the fact that it is making huge assumptions and doing pre-layouts while content is still downloading.

For "HTML5 performance" which is really just Canvas performance - I just ran the test myself. IE9 did not beat Chrome. And IE9's framerate was not consistent, while Chrome's was consistent throughout. What it looks like is that Microsoft has over-optimized certain rendering tasks to show off their own demos and any rendered output that is similar gets a huge performance boost, but the overall performance from IE9's Canvas is inconsistent and terrible. It'd be like playing an FPS where when you're not shooting a gun you have 50000 fps, but when you get into a firefight it drops to 3 fps. Why the huge difference? Tricks -- what IE is known for doing to get better scores.

Overall, this article is terrible. Half of the tests are subjective, and half of them don't matter. Hell, they rank WebGL and HTML5 HW accel below Java and Silverlight in performance. The only major website still using Silverlight is Netflix. And I haven't used a Java applet in .. 5 years?
Re:What the summary did not include by AmiMoJo · 2012-07-07 09:19 · Score: 1

The results are largely meaningless because they can't account for network conditions. Plus you don't care about a 67ms difference between IE9 and Firefox because it is imperceptible when waiting less than 1 second for a page to open.
More interesting is the performance when switching tabs, where Chrome is way ahead of Firefox. Similarly page scrolling is smoother in Chrome, especially when Firefox is trying to decode imagines as they appear on the screen. Chrome is always responsive while Firefox lags like hell at times. I don't use the others regularly so can't comment.
Mozilla got it wrong. They went nuts reducing memory consumption when the competition was focused on performance. Yeah, Chrome uses more memory, but it's worth it. Chrome seems to do okay on a gig or two of RAM as well, where as Firefox fails to scale for people with lots of RAM at all. Even back in the Netscape days it would adjust the memory cache size based on the amount of RAM you had, now it can't even turn off performance draining features like image-decode-on-display if you have 16GB installed.

--
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Re:What the summary did not include by Billly+Gates · 2012-07-07 10:34 · Score: 1

What kind of graphics do you have on your system? IE 9 is the fastest on my system under graphical tests because I have a dedicated ati 5750 with 1 gig of dedicated ram. Hardware acceleration uses the extra ram on my video card as well. I do have to say starting at Chrome 18 when I change the about:flags to use gpu acceleration it is starting to catch up to IE 9,
I noticed SWTOR FPS is cut in half when I have more than 5 tabs opened in IE 9. I do not have this problem with Chrome or FF. I do not have any software to check for video ram but I think IE 9 does tricks like this.
On my older el cheapo laptop IE 9 is not that much difference with choppy graphics compared to FF or Chrome. My guess is because the video is not dedicated. I get no benefit.
Chrome seems to cream others with AJAX sites like Google maps and other things. So they are do different things better. CSS 3 support is lacking in IE 9 because it is a 2010 era browser. Java applets are still heavily used in the enterprise for Kronos, Bank of America, Manpower, Oracle crap, ADP, and other financial institutions. These systems get infected all the time iwth java exploits and it makes me want to scream as these companies wont support any Java newer than 1.4 in many of these systems and as a result can't be upgraded to WIndows 7 yet. Consumer versions of these sites do not have the java applets.

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http://saveie6.com/
Re:What the summary did not include by jmerlin · 2012-07-07 11:18 · Score: 1

I'm running 2 580 GTX 3GBs in SLI, and I tested with Chrome 20.
Re:What the summary did not include by froggymana · 2012-07-07 17:35 · Score: 1

Then again, saving 100 ms for opening 20 pages a day for a million users means you save whole man-month each year!
I wonder how much faster the average American would have to drive to save that same amount of time.

--
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
Re:What the summary did not include by Waccoon · 2012-07-07 17:59 · Score: 1

Opera lags a lot after a page refresh, thanks to some kind of graphics issue with the progress indicator. The browser feels fast as hell until it tries to clear the progress bar and print the word "Done".
Firefox, of course, pauses whenever it damn well feels like.

You know, I really don't care by wwphx · 2012-07-07 04:01 · Score: 3, Interesting

Mozilla has screwed the pooch for Firefox OS-X users. The single feature that I most liked, aside from the fact that I didn't have to use IE, was the resume session feature. (When I switched to Mac 5ish years ago, I was mainly using FF on my PC and Safari didn't support add-ins at that time AFAIK) Well, that feature doesn't work under Lion for recent versions of Firefox, I've tried down to v10.x.. On my new Air, no recent version of Firefox will keep my sessions. So I abandoned it, found add-ins for Safari that give me AdBlock and session restore, and I'm planning on deleting it. On my older MacBook Pro, also running Lion, I have Firefox 3.6, which though riddled with problems, does session restore correctly.

From what I've been told, a fix is no where in sight, and since a new OS-X is due later this year, I don't expect it to be fixed this year. I neither know nor care what change in the OS upgrade broke session restore, but I consider it a critical feature and I don't know if I'll be using Firefox again on my Macs.

--
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.

Re:You know, I really don't care by Wordplay · 2012-07-07 06:27 · Score: 4, Informative

I'm a little confused. I'm on latest Lion. Just killed Firefox. Restarted it. There are my tabs. As far as I know it should work for you.
I work for Mozilla QA. If you want to talk about this more, you can contact me at gmealer@mozilla.com (my name is Geo) and I'll either help you out or direct you to someone who can.
Re:You know, I really don't care by Alex+Zepeda · 2012-07-07 07:55 · Score: 1

Interesting. Firefox 13 restores sessions just fine on both of my MacOS 10.7 machines (work) and my 10.6 machine (personal). SVG handling is still shaky, performance goes in the crapper after loading image heavy tabs, and the mouse cursor disappears from time to time on 10.7... but the session restore stuff works fine for me. Given how frequently I've got to restart Firefox compared to Chrome, I'd notice pretty quickly if it didn't.
Oh. Yeah. Safari should handle sessions without any plugins. Window -> Reopen all tabs or somesuch.

--
The revolution will be mocked
Re:You know, I really don't care by BeanThere · 2012-07-07 12:11 · Score: 1

Likewise, also restores my sessions just fine.
I continually try all the browsers, and somehow I still keep coming back to Firefox --- it's still the best browser.
Re:You know, I really don't care by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-08 03:22 · Score: 0

On my new Air, no recent version of Firefox will keep my sessions. So I abandoned it, found add-ins for Safari that give me AdBlock and session restore, and I'm planning on deleting it. On my older MacBook Pro, also running Lion, I have Firefox 3.6, which though riddled with problems, does session restore correctly.

I have a piece of rocket science I'd like to share with you. This is so advanced and incredible that it will blow your fucking mind.
Open Firefox
Click "Firefox" on the menu bar, select Preferences.
On the window that appears, switch to "General".
At the top (below the tab strip), you'll see an area called "Startup"
There's a drop box labelled "When Firefox starts", pull it down and select "Show my windows and tabs from last time"
Click the Ok button
I realise that this is difficult, arcane black magic but it should give you the feature you want.
Re:You know, I really don't care by Reziac · 2012-07-08 05:59 · Score: 1

In that case... WTF is with the cache in recent FF/SM/Moz family browsers? For a dozen tabs it can create 2000 directories, half of them empty. I finally put it on a RAMdisk to get rid of the massive fragmentation problem. And I discovered that the memory leak (about 100mb/day if allowed to run 24/7) is directly related to the cache -- if cache is cleared after every session, the leak becomes miniscule, a few megs instead of 100mb or more. If it weren't that I too-often have to root thru the cache to snag some file, I wouldn't let it have one at all.

--
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Re:You know, I really don't care by Wordplay · 2012-07-09 11:01 · Score: 1

Like I said, contact me at the address above. I can't say for sure from a quick read whether the behavior you're seeing is expected or not, but I'd be happy to discuss it further and see if there's an issue to be filed.

Tabs... by trancemission · 2012-07-07 04:03 · Score: 2

I remember when I first came accross tabbed browsing - it was Opera [which was ahead in many areas at the time - mouse gestures being another :)]

The reason why it was revolutionary was because it allowed you to open links in the background and they would load whilst you was still skimming the page/results. This was the days of dialup / early ADSL and allowed for more efficient browsing. In theory we should now be loading pages at lightning speed [literally] . We don't. RAM is not the problem.

The amount of RAM usage is pretty irrelevant unless you run out, it is more important how it is handled; which depeneds on too many factors to benchmark.

It would be nice if we could benchmark the overall 'browsing' experience, which in this day in age of resource hungry/wasting websites is pointless. [I am looking at you slashdot, I do not need to dynamically load comments, I have enough bandwdith to load all the comments I have filtered by score and my browser is more than capable of showing me them]

If the problem is the amount of RAM you are using when browsing the web, there is a far more fundamental problem.

That word doesn't mean what you think it means by Sloppy · 2012-07-07 04:07 · Score: 1

memory efficiency, which measures RAM released after tabs are closed

I think it's swell that people look for memory leaks and that newer software sometimes fixes leaks in old versions.

But if you're measuring memory "efficiency" right after closing tabs rather than right before you close them, then you're doing it wrong.

"My hash table is as memory efficient as your sorted array, because after the program completes, it uses the same amount of memory!"

--
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.

Re:That word doesn't mean what you think it means by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 05:49 · Score: 0

They measure both you dumbass.
They specifically explain that they measure how much memory is left over.
So you open 1 tab, measure, open 39 tabs, close them and measure.
The difference is an indication of how much memory is leaked over time.
They measure total memory usage as well in a different graph.

Re:who gives a fuck by NotBorg · 2012-07-07 04:11 · Score: 5, Insightful

Why "enterprises" can't customize open source software is a bit of a mystery to me. Interns really are cheap these days (esp. by $$$ enterprise $$$ standards). Seriously enterprise customers want a browser specifically tailored to their needs for absolutely nothing. It's funny.

Auto updates can be turned off both at compile time option and as an installed option. It's never been easier to bring in a custom patch set and build software and yet they're still bitch'n. They don't even have to pay a fucking license fee but act as if they're paying customers. They act like they dished out thousands of dollars for support like they do for their Oracle database software or Microsoft servers. They'll pay MS and Oracle per processor/core for less customization but when it comes to Mozilla they expect $0.00 to get them everything.

Enterprise babies need to grow up and L2.

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I want this account deleted.

Re:who gives a fuck by Surt · 2012-07-07 04:14 · Score: 4, Informative

firefox tools/options/advanced/update
But you may not be qualified to install firefox if you couldn't figure that out.

--
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking

Re:who gives a fuck by Pringless · 2012-07-07 04:14 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Very few Slashdotters actually are poor people. Even those writing from third world countries. Not many of slashdotters have to use webcafes or really worry about money. You're just living way beyond your means, but you are still not poor.

Way to bury the lead... by barlevg · 2012-07-07 04:19 · Score: 1

Shouldn't the headline here be "Chrome Wins Tom's Hardware Grand Prix?"

Firefox 11.0 Mac OS X 32-Bit Leaks Memory by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 04:22 · Score: 0

... like a sieve.

If I leave my MacBook Pro - the early 2006 Core Duo 32-Bit model, not one of the later 64-Bit Core 2 Duos - it will eventually run my unit completely out of swap space, so that most of the processes hang. Just killing processes won't get the other ones to resume, which I think is an OS X kernel bug.

I was all set to post a detailed Bugzilla report when I saw this article. I had not realized I was so far behind the current release.

But how the Hell can they go through two major revision levels in just a few months? That sounds just like when I was working for Microport Systems, and I started unexpectedly getting support calls about how we skipped a whole bunch of major releases. Well it turned out they just wanted to be at the same version number as SCO was.

While Microport SystemV/AT was real AT&T Unix for the 286 and 386 PCs, whereas SCO Xenix was developed completely independenly of Unix, Xenix was a far more mature product. Thus its higher version number led our potential users to think Xenix was the better choice.

Anyway, try this on your own Firefox, on any platform. Let me know whether you get a memory leak.

On Mac OS X, you can use /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app to look at the "Real Mem" used by a process. That's the amount of Virtual Memory which the process has actually allocated, not just its total virtual space.

I think the Windows task list that you can bring up with Ctrl-Alt-Delete will show you memory for Windows processes. On *NIX you can use "ps -ef".

Launch Firefox. Think of some event that made headlines all over the worl back in the Nineties. Open a few of the results in tabs. Open the pages they link from in new tabs. Open a few windows as well.

When you have a half dozen or so windows with maybe two or three hundred tabs, minimize all the windows, or on OS X, hide Firefox entirely, then watch its memory consumption.

In my case - again this is with 11.0 so maybe they've fixed in in version 13 - it grows by about a hundred megabytes per hour. I have all manner of crap on my drive, and OS X creates backing store files as needed, so after a while Firefox's memory leak will also fill up my filesystem. Once the filesystem is completely full, no process can allocate new VM anymore, so a bunch of them get suspended. I'm then presented with a window that won't go away until I terminate all the suspended processes.

Just quitting the tasks that I don't really need running, or throwing away files will help.

Michael David Crawford, who can't be bothered to recover his password.

Re:Firefox 11.0 Mac OS X 32-Bit Leaks Memory by msclrhd · 2012-07-07 04:51 · Score: 1

Open a new tab and point it to "about:memory" -- this should tell you what is consuming the memory.

What about Konqueror? by spiderbitendeath · 2012-07-07 04:25 · Score: 1

Just for shits and giggles I opened 40 tabs in Konqueror. Shows memory usage at 356MiB. Whereas my Opera window with 4 tabs open is at 334MiB. Anyone know what sites they test it with? Cause I'd like to see a fair comparison.

--
Sometimes when I'm working on projects things disappear, I suspect gremlins.

Still a dog on Linux by Pausanias · 2012-07-07 04:32 · Score: 4, Interesting

I love Firefox, but it's still about 50% faster on Windows 7 than on Linux. Chrome wins clearly on Linux. I agree that on Windows they're comparable.

The inferior chrome junk by Snaller · 2012-07-07 04:40 · Score: 2

There is nothing "cool" about - that they by design decision refuse to reflow text on pages (which is a HUGE problem on mobile devices) just means the idiots at google have entered the evil club.
If they ever come out that will be a happy day indeed.

Only kids care about "cool"

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If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating

Re:The inferior chrome junk by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 09:01 · Score: 0

This is modded up? What a troll comment.
They don't format text in a convenient way... EVIL!
Re:The inferior chrome junk by AmiMoJo · 2012-07-07 09:09 · Score: 1

What are you on about? Chrome for mobile devices reflows text just fine. Well, except on web pages that state they don't want to allow it because they are already (supposedly) optimized for mobile viewing, which is the correct behaviour.

--
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC

Re:who gives a fuck by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 04:44 · Score: 0

Doesn't matter. This setting is not selectable at installation and while it may be selectable by some manual edit of an ini file that type of manipulation is likely to break over time. How would you deploy a well tested version of firefox (post 3.6) to 1000 computers without worrying about them being updated to some untested version in the near future? I've done some reading on firefox esr and in it's current state it is still not enterprise ready... even unofficial builds like Waterfox are better suited to an enterprise model.

Re:who gives a fuck by Barsteward · 2012-07-07 04:45 · Score: 2

Enterprises want someone else to blame if it goes titsup.com. enterprise managers are wimps and clueless

--
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)

Re:who gives a fuck by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 04:48 · Score: 0

You should, because our new super-duper upgraded browser requires 17GB of RAM.

Firefox needs to re-Pheonix. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 04:50 · Score: 0

I said it in the earlier Thunderbird story and I'll say it again. Firefox needs to get the right balance between speed and memory. Focus on getting all HTML5 implemented and then optimize it all. Then with all the features in place it won't be necessary to have rapid release and people will be able to relax with ESR.

If you look at market share statistics you find that Firefox versions are fragmented like Android is, with too many people using old versions because they find it difficult to update all the time.

Firefox 13 slower than 12 by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 04:54 · Score: 0

I've noticed that Firefox 13 series is some 10% slower for me when compared to version 12.

I even re-downloaded version 12 after updating to 13 to re-check.

Its not related to hardware acceleration either (forced turning off layers in both version).

Anyone else suffering this?

Firefox throwing out the baby with the bath water by hackertourist · 2012-07-07 05:00 · Score: 4, Interesting

The recent improvements in FF memory usage have some severe drawbacks. FF will throw away images in background tabs, and reload them when you switch to the tab. But the reason I load new pages in background tabs is that I don't want to wait for the page to load and be rendered.

It gets worse when you quit FF, and then reopen the app and have it reload your last session. It will create the tabs, but it won't load the page until you activate the tab. Now this is something I'd be willing to tolerate for tabs that have been open for a few weeks. But not for tabs that I've created recently and/or activate frequently.

I also notice that FF memory usage steadily increases over a couple of days, while the number of tabs remains roughly constant.

In other words, they have reduced the memory footprint not by tackling whatever process is hoarding memory like Scrat stacking acorns in his giant hollow tree, but by throwing away items that use memory but are otherwise static (images).

Re:RAM Usage still a small issue on phones by lindi · 2012-07-07 05:10 · Score: 1

I totally agree on desktop. On phones it still makes sense to optimize memory usage though. I'm using chromium 18 on my openmoko that only has 128 MB of RAM and it's about 20 MB of it is constantly in swap. Do you know any tricks that I could use to reduce the memory usage at least slightly? I've considered using compressed swap (compcache) when I can upgrade the kernel.

We're entitled to whatever fixes EXIST now, by aussersterne · 2012-07-07 05:19 · Score: 1

and if they're de-facto on Chrome (i.e. fewest obvious bugs, highest overall stability) then they're free to choose Chrome until Firefox becomes the browser with the highest number of fixes that EXIST now.

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STOP . AMERICA . NOW

Re:who gives a fuck by PCM2 · 2012-07-07 05:21 · Score: 1

firefox tools/options/advanced/update But you may not be qualified to install firefox if you couldn't figure that out.

So can you configure the .msi to set that option by default? What's that? Mozilla doesn't ship Firefox as an .msi? Oh.

--
Breakfast served all day!

Re:who gives a fuck by GNious · 2012-07-07 05:29 · Score: 1

Seems TitsUp.com is a premium domain that is for sale ... could be nice name for computer-repair shop (ahem..), but not for 10K USD.

Re:who gives a fuck by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 05:31 · Score: 1

How would you deploy a well tested version of firefox (post 3.6) to 1000 computers without worrying about them being updated to some untested version in the near future?

If you and your staff are not incompetent it's trivial. If it's NOT trivial you have MUCH worse problems to worry about than upgrading browsers, as it is then apparent that your entire network is as fragile as an eggshell. Making any kind of changes whatsoever probably has sweeping deleterious effects that never get fully troubleshooted.

Misses the point by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 05:35 · Score: 1

Test is missing the point, Firefox sure has a small memory footprint initially, the problem is that it never deallocates memory, the memory remains associated with the process and isn't properly pooled, this leads to severe heap fragmentation over time (so while you'll initially have something like 60-100 MB, this can easily climb to 300-600 MB+ after a couple of hours), and it will never got down significantly, in fact the more deallocs firefox does, the more fragmented the heap becomes.

Re:Misses the point by Teun · 2012-07-07 11:42 · Score: 1

That used to be the case, I observe 13.0.1 on Linux behaves a little better.
Until the last version I would see it eventually gobble up most of my 8 GB of RAM, presently it will never go over 4 GB.
As a matter of fact it looks like FF has a limit set to 50% of RAM.

--
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."

Memory is not the Firefox problem by aussersterne · 2012-07-07 05:36 · Score: 4, Informative

Like others here, I have many gigabytes of RAM, so I'm not too concerned with the memory usage issue. Firefox is also good on speed; that doesn't bug me.

But I stopped using Firefox back when I was last a Linux user (ca. 2009) and have continued to use alternatives (Chrome and Safari, most notably) on OS X because Firefox suffers from too many WTF? moments. Whatever you call them—bugs, the results of Firefox's architecture, I don't care—they make Firefox a non-starter for me. For example:

(1) When using Firefox on OS X all window updates sometimes suddenly stop. Nothing is clickable, nothing is scrollable. The way around this is to drag the window—even just one pixel. After that, refreshes will return. That's bad if you have data auto-refreshing on a Firefox window you're monitoring. And it's not an OS X bug because only Mozilla applications (Firefox, Thunderbird) display this issue, and have done for the last umpteen versions. (For the record, this happend both on my older Mac desktop and on my new unibody MBP.)

(2) The UI still sucks more than any other browser. Widgets and graphical elements misaligned from their active (i.e. clickable) zones, tearing and refresh issues for stateful widgets, etc. The point of the UI is to metaphorically embody what's going on in the code. Once the UI no longer reflects program state, you basically can't talk to your program.

(3) Crashes. Firefox remains the most crash-happy of the browsers. It does this at random. My last crash-followed-by-bug-reporting window was yesterday, when I fired up the latest version of FF for OS X to survey the meta titles of a bunch of pages rapidly. (My biggest complaint about Chrome is the absence of the meta title in the title bar.) About 10 minutes in, FF crashed. My uptime is measured in months right now, and I've had instances of Chrome up for that long. With FF I'm lucky if I get two days.

(4) Graphical appearance. It's damned hard to find a nice, professional FF theme that looks minimal. I just want something that has the same ethos as Chrome or Safari: simple widgets, no cruft, all of a cloth, that integrate well with the OS appearance. There are dozens of FF themes and "personalities" but all of them have that same "I'm OSS!" appearance that KDE also suffers from.

If Firefox were to stop sucking on these points, I'd give it another look regardless of memory use. But it's been a lot of releases since 2009 and though I keep the latest version of FF installed for cross-browser testing, I haven't seen any improvement on these points that would make me want to switch for my general browsing needs.

--
STOP . AMERICA . NOW

Re:Memory is not the Firefox problem by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 06:47 · Score: 1

I think people need to stop thinking their particular problems with things are the norm. Absolutely none of these apply to me, and I've been using Firefox on Linux for years. I think this comes down to personal preference, so bitching about it is pointless.
For example, for me, Firefox has the most minimal UI, the most visually well-integrated with my WM, is the most stable together with Opera, and uses the least RAM. The nightlies are as stable as Chrome's stable version for me.
In fact, none of the browsers is head and shoulders above the others in Linux. Chrome has the fastest, but least reliable performance. Opera is the least integrated with the OS and is the slowest in most cases, but is the most reliable. Firefox is the middle-of-the-roader, but is still the most extensible and customizable.
As for RAM, to each his own. I have 8gb, but I'd rather use them for something more than browsing. With Firefox, I can run an extra VM and perform more CPU-intensive work then with Chrome, but I'm hardly a typical user.
Re:Memory is not the Firefox problem by aussersterne · 2012-07-07 07:02 · Score: 1

Sure, if you'd rather I foreground that, I will:
All of the above are the reasons why *I* don't use Firefox, based on *my* experience. But I'm not in a position to choose browsers for anyone else like many here are, and I am a sample size of three (machines in the household, 2 OS X, 1 Win7, where we have these issues/opinions).

--
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Re:Memory is not the Firefox problem by gmack · 2012-07-07 09:46 · Score: 1

To be fair I find it's a matter of disk activity. If the disk is busy with something (even unrelated to FF) then the whole thing will choppy with frozen interfaces and windows that take forever to refresh. I haven't really had a problem since switching to SSD but that's hardly a reason for me not to wish they would fix it.
Re:Memory is not the Firefox problem by BeanThere · 2012-07-07 12:14 · Score: 1

With FF I'm lucky if I get two days
I use FF on Windows, and honestly, it is extremely solid for me - it very seldom crashes (and when it does, it thankfully session-restores fine). And I regularly have literally hundreds of tabs open at a time, for weeks, months etc. Actually that's one of the reasons I keep coming back to Firefox - little things, like the 'don't load tab contents until you open the tab' become important when you have 500 tabs open.

Auto-update bad for enterprises? BUNK! by fzammett · 2012-07-07 05:48 · Score: 1

I hear it a lot: "auto-update in browsers is bad for enterprises because it'll just randomly break apps". I consider this argument bunk. Simply block the update sites in your corporate DNS and you're done. ESPECIALLY when you're talking about a silent background update, I'm pretty sure you won't even see a warning or anything in that case.

I suppose if you work somewhere that uses someone else' DNS servers this isn't an option, but even then you probably are going through a proxy, so block it there!

This isn't theory: my company was doing this for a while (until the development staff complained enough and they changed the policy around alternate browsers)... it works just fine, isn't expensive to implement and, of course, if you get to a point where a particular new version is certified you just un-block for a few weeks and let the updates take place.

--
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa

Re:Auto-update bad for enterprises? BUNK! by brusk · 2012-07-07 06:53 · Score: 1

You're thinking about this bass-ackwards. For a stable corporate release, use the ESR of Firefox. Don't try blocking things in DNS--for two reasons. First, there are now lots of mobile machines likely to be on the corporate networks (personal laptops, tablets, smartphones), and there's no reason to block them. Second, lots of corporate machines are notebooks, so they are going to be online outside of the LAN, and will autoupdate there. So better to go with a different release path than to try to do this at the firewall.

--
.sig withheld by request
Re:Auto-update bad for enterprises? BUNK! by fzammett · 2012-07-07 08:34 · Score: 1

Good point about laptops and updates outside the network. I didn't mean to suggest DNS blocking was the only way or the best way, just that its one easy way to deal with what some think is a big issue (aside from your valid outside-the-network-update point).

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If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
Re:Auto-update bad for enterprises? BUNK! by multipartmixed · 2012-07-07 09:37 · Score: 1

What do you block when the updates are served by a major CDN?

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Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?

Re: swapless by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 05:49 · Score: 0

You'll wish you had a swap file when you accidentally write a program that allocates too much RAM.

Swap lets it slow down enough that you can kill things before the OS starts deciding which things to kill.

Re:Firefox throwing out the baby with the bath wat by drinkypoo · 2012-07-07 06:05 · Score: 2

The recent improvements in FF memory usage have some severe drawbacks. FF will throw away images in background tabs, and reload them when you switch to the tab. But the reason I load new pages in background tabs is that I don't want to wait for the page to load and be rendered.

image.mem.min_discard_timeout_ms
image.mem.decodeondraw
image.mem.discardable

Etc etc

HTH HAND

--
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"

Re:who gives a fuck by Rockoon · 2012-07-07 06:07 · Score: 1

Its easily worth 10K if its a topless computer-repair shop. Too bad none of us have the charisma to convince a halfway decent looking stripper that we arent creepers.

--
"His name was James Damore."

Workset and memory usage by cnettel · 2012-07-07 06:10 · Score: 4, Insightful

The main problem with this article is that it seems like the authors are simply reporting the compound number for Memory - Working Set for all browser processes. This is problematic in so many ways it ain't even funny. Foremost, multiple processes requiring the same page mapped into RAM will count that page multiple times. With architectures involving a lot of cross-process communication and multiple instances, like IE and Chrome, all code pages that are mapped into multiple processes will be counted multiple times (including any Windows OS DLLs mapped by IE), as long as they are part of the active working set. In addition some of the inter-process communication is probably handled by mapping common regions of memory, and thus also counted multiple times.

So, in one sense, IE and Chrome are losing out big in the multi-tab test. On the other hand, when tabs are closed, the related processes are also completely closed. This means that the associated heap is returned in full. In Firefox, even if some regions of the heap are freed back to the OS, Windows will not actively reclaim that working set. Slowly, the untouched pages will be removed and replaced by caching, but if there is no memory load, the best guess by the OS is that a process that just used a lot of memory and freed it might start doing it again. It is possible that Firefox, due to the monolithic process structure, ends up with a more fragmented heap (or a heap implementation that is not returning pages to the OS) so the OS could not successfully reclaim the pages (and only page them out to disk as a last resort), but we do not know that from these tests. It is easy to try this yourself, write up some small C program allocating a big buffer, freeing it and then pausing for a scanf/gets or something.

It is relatively easy to measure CPU usage or amount of I/O. Total time usage is also easy to measure and it says something about the conditions even under load. Memory is quite different. Memory is allocated all the time and the total bandwidth usage is closely related to the actual computations of the CPU. Even in a fully virtualized environment, the hypervisor cannot keep too detailed stats on memory usage - the overhead would balloon. At the same time, memory is a constrained resource with complicated temporal dependencies. You cannot free some memory from a process now and just give it back later. And when you bring multiple related processes into the mix, what you measure is all depending on how you define your tests. In many situations, the best metric is probably to look at full system metrics anyway, i.e. delta on total available/free memory in Windows. Many of the same issues will still apply, though. The question really becomes why you are interested in memory usage. If you want to know how the OS will behave when another process is allocating a lot of memory, test for that and verify memory usage as well as load times when you bring back the browser.

Re:Workset and memory usage by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 13:11 · Score: 0

They don't say which memory metric they are reporting. It could be working set, but which one? Private or total? In any case working set has a number of problems, beyond those you mention. I'd prefer they report process commit, that we we don't have to worry about working set trimming by the OS, but commit does bring other issues, especially when the browser uses large number of threads (stack commit), and may not correlate well to physical memory usage in some cases.

Re:Firefox throwing out the baby with the bath wat by HockeyPuck · 2012-07-07 06:14 · Score: 3, Informative

It gets worse when you quit FF, and then reopen the app and have it reload your last session. It will create the tabs, but it won't load the page until you activate the tab. Now this is something I'd be willing to tolerate for tabs that have been open for a few weeks. But not for tabs that I've created recently and/or activate frequently.

1. Go into Options,
2. On the Startup box, there's an option "Don't Load Tabs Until Selected"

3. Uncheck it.

Now it will load all the tabs at startup.

Re:who gives a fuck by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 06:16 · Score: 0

Very few Slashdotters actually are poor people.

How do you know? Have you done a survey? Or are you just a pompous asshole who pulls smug conclusions out of your butthole?

Re: swapless by swilver · 2012-07-07 06:17 · Score: 1

Run without swap for a while, and you'll begin to understand what difference it makes. Every single app that is on your taskbar responds immediately, always, whether you used it 5 seconds ago or 3 days ago, it makes no difference.

Swap, while theoritically allowing optimal RAM use, depends heavily on the accuracy of its predictions of when I want to do something. Unfortunately, this prediction algorithm basically comes down to "swap stuff out that hasn't been used recently", which is piss-poor at predicting what I want to do next.

Since I have plenty of RAM, and donot want the system to cache:
- the 8 GB MKV file that I just watched
- the 100 GB of files that were processed in the overnight backup/virus scan
- the 20 GB of downloads/uploads that were done overnight ... I just restrict the system by not allowing swap at all since apparently it is too stupid to know that my mail program/browser/etc can be used at ANY time and that I have very little patience waiting for it to be swapped back.

Re:who gives a fuck by Surt · 2012-07-07 06:49 · Score: 1

Again, if you don't know how to deploy application changes without going through their packaged installer, I'm not clear that you're qualified to do so.

--
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking

Re:who gives a fuck by Bert64 · 2012-07-07 06:52 · Score: 1

How could it get updated when the users running it are (presumably) non admin users who won't have sufficient access to update it...
Firefox automatic updates don't seem to bother linux distros, where the built in update function is disabled and the system package manager is used for installing updates.

--
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Re:Firefox throwing out the baby with the bath wat by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 06:54 · Score: 0

I think they've isolated the problems I was running into just fine, so maybe they just haven't gotten to YOUR particular issues. For me, Firefox runs in the background for weeks at a time without chewing up my RAM, it still loads tabs in the background just fine, and the only noticeable drawback is that large images can take a second to pop in when I switch to their tab. Hardly worth crying about, and on my older PCs I'd rather have Firefox use less RAM than more CPU.

Re:who gives a fuck by Bronster · 2012-07-07 07:02 · Score: 1

Hold on...

* well tested version
* likely to break over time

I see a disconnect here. How will your well tested version break again?

Re:who gives a fuck by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 07:44 · Score: 0

wait... assholes have buttholes now?

Shuffled menus by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 07:53 · Score: 0

Does this take into account the time it takes to look for things in the old place, only to find the menus were shuffled? I'd rather have a slower browser that doesn't shuffle the menus.

Chrome Improvement by PineHall · 2012-07-07 08:39 · Score: 1

True, Chrome (19.0 points) regains the lead from Firefox (18.5 points). Firefox was the last winner of Tom's Hardware Web Browser Grand Prix, and Firefox has been good with memory for several versions now. The improvement that Tom's Hardware talks about is Chrome now has HTML5 hardware acceleration for Windows (since Chrome 18). That is the news, not Firefox's low memory usage.

Teardown of a crashed process: dumprep.exe by tepples · 2012-07-07 08:41 · Score: 1

When Flash crashes, it takes a while for the plug-in container to dump core (dumprep.exe). I understood "when - for example - flash is in the middle of crashing" as unresponsiveness while Windows is tearing down the crashed plug-in container.

Re: swapless by XenithOrb · 2012-07-07 09:20 · Score: 1

This exactly what I do as well. At the absolute worst it ends up looking like this:

http://i.imgur.com/3T3xh.jpg

and I have a decent amount of things running in the background there. No swap, and I know exactly what you're talking about when it comes to "the difference it makes." When I restart, I dread the 'spin-up' time for everything to get into the cache where it belongs :P

But yeah, 16GB of ram and that graphic shows exactly how it should be used.

Re:Firefox throwing out the baby with the bath wat by XenithOrb · 2012-07-07 09:32 · Score: 1

I really can't notice the effects of these settings being present.

Mine default to:
image.mem.discardable = true
image.mem.max_bytes_for_sync_decode = 150000
image.mem.max_ms_before_yield = 5
image.mem.min_discard_timeout_ms = 10000
image.mem.decodeondraw = true

Are you suggesting that we change these values? If so, preferably to what?

Re:Firefox throwing out the baby with the bath wat by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 09:32 · Score: 0

About the images...

Firefox doesn't get rid of the images and reload the per se.

Images used on the web are compressed (gif, jpeg, etc). The picture is decompressed to a raw file for viewing (which adds to the used memory without adding to usability in most cases). On a page with lots of pictures, this can become a serious memory problem. The solution is to scrap the memory-hungry raw images when they can't be seen anyway and only decompress them when they can be seen.

Firefox only discards images if all of the following are true:
1. all the images together use more than 50MB of memory
2. the images can't be seen
3. the set amount of time has passed (20-40 sec).

The result is that people who only use a couple of tabs at a time will seldom have raw images scrapped, people with lots of images won't lose the images they're currently looking at (in any tab) and won't lose the images in the current tab unless they haven't scrolled by them in a while. This seems to be a resonable trade-off to me.

Most browsers (to my knowledge) have different rates at which they discard these images, but they still must or run the risk of running out of memory. If anything, Firefox is slightly more aggressive about this (something that one can change if one desires to using about:config)

Improved? FF won last three comparisons by guanxi · 2012-07-07 09:34 · Score: 1

Not that the comparisons count for much, but it's disappointing that Slashdot's headline says "Notably Improved" when Firefox won the three previous comparisons and finished second this time:

* Grand Prix 7
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037-17.html

* Grand Prix 8
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129-18.html

* Grand Prix 9
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129-18.html

Re:Improved? FF won last three comparisons by guanxi · 2012-07-07 09:36 · Score: 1

Sorry for the typo; here is Grand Prix 8:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-air-chrome-16-firefox-9-benchmark,3108-18.html

Few Tabs: Chrome. Many Tabs: Firefox by Sarusa · 2012-07-07 09:44 · Score: 1

This isn't a big surprise to me. Firefox performs far better than Chrome with a dozen or more tabs open - in memory use, speed, and stability (64-bit Win7, might make a difference).

Now if I've only got a few tabs open, Chrome screams.

So I use Firefox as the long term browser, open for weeks with dozens of tabs for work, personal, etc. Chrome if I need some short term speed. Always mount a scratch browser!

You have already run out by tepples · 2012-07-07 10:18 · Score: 1

The amount of RAM usage is pretty irrelevant unless you run out

If your PC's hard drive is bigger than its RAM, you have already run out.

Re:Firefox throwing out the baby with the bath wat by tepples · 2012-07-07 10:20 · Score: 1

At the minimum, image.mem.min_discard_timeout_ms should be set to 60000 times the number of minutes between when you load a document and when you expect to view it.

But that's not how Windows measures memory usage. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 10:40 · Score: 0

No, the browser is not built into the kernel. It lives entirely in DLLs in user-space, all of which are counted separately against the working set of each process that loads them.

Of course, I'm speaking from actually knowing what I was talking about, whereas you were were just guessing about what was "most likely" from a position of complete ignorance. Clearly, your perception of "most likely" was biased by your predetermined conclusion that Windows *had* to be somehow 'worse' (it certainly wasn't contaminated by any hint of actual knowledge of how Windows works internally), thus leading you to try and come up with a reason to justify ignoring the actual genuine empirical evidence presented in TFA. You were basically denying the evidence of your senses in favour of supposedly a priori knowledge about the universe pulled entirely out of your own orifice. That's a guaranteed recipe for self-deceit.

Re:Firefox throwing out the baby with the bath wat by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 10:43 · Score: 0

Hey, thanks for that. I'd kind of forgotten about about:config in Firefox. Now I just need to find a good page describing all the options, so I can experiment with other options.

Re:Firefox throwing out the baby with the bath wat by makomk · 2012-07-07 11:07 · Score: 1

FF will throw away images in background tabs, and reload them when you switch to the tab.

If you've got really large high-res images open in tabs, this is pretty much indispensable though. On the geekier parts of the Internet I visit, it's easy to open several big images in tabs without realising it (die shots of chips are huge, for instance).

Re:who gives a fuck by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-07 19:03 · Score: 0

Use Frontmotion Firefox

why are IE and safari in the competition? by allo · 2012-07-08 00:28 · Score: 2

IMHO It should only contain cross-platform browsers.

Re:why are IE and safari in the competition? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-08 02:01 · Score: 0

Safari is cross-platform. It's available for Mac OS X and Windows.
Internet Explorer is also cross-platform. It's available for Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Lower RAM usage, so? by mysidia · 2012-07-08 01:50 · Score: 1

It's not RAM usage alone i'm concerned about. I can appreciate lower RAM usage for resource-constrained systems, but speed efficiency seems a problem for FF.

I upgraded my desktop from 4GB of RAM to 16GB of RAM, in my effort to combat extremely poor Firefox performance after a few days of uptime and ~20 or so tabs open, and I do have a Quad core 3.2Ghz Intel i3 CPU.

So far I have been highly disappointed with Firefox, because there has been little/no performance improvement with Firefox, despite making available on the system just about all the unused RAM a web browser could ever want

Scalability is the important thing.

How many tabs, bookmarks, and history items can Firefox scale to, and have good performance on my desktop?

20 or 30 tabs don't seem like a lot.... why the heck does it take 30 seconds to close an open tab or 20 seconds to open a new one after my browser has been open for a week or so, with about that much browsing?

The performance of Chrome has been absolutely stellar by comparison, with this amount of system memory available.

Re:Firefox throwing out the baby with the bath wat by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-08 03:52 · Score: 0

The recent improvements in FF memory usage have some severe drawbacks. FF will throw away images in background tabs, and reload them when you switch to the tab. But the reason I load new pages in background tabs is that I don't want to wait for the page to load and be rendered.

1) It only throws away images, not the layout tree. You only have the wait for JPEGs/PNGs to be unpacked into RAM.
2) Unless you've got massive mega-pixel images, the decoding should only cause a short stutter when switching tabs.
3) If you have got massive mega-pixel images then keeping those things in RAM would be stupid anyway.

I also notice that FF memory usage steadily increases over a couple of days, while the number of tabs remains roughly constant.

1) Firefox has the same problem that all programs that have been left open for ages do: Heap Fragmentation. This causes a minor blowout in usage by something like 20% more than actual usage. Waste is proportional to actual use and should never exceed 50% real memory use.
2) If you have any "Web 2.0" pages you leave open for ages (AJAX), it's very possible for crap JS to "leak" memory and increase the total usage. [The memory isn't really leaked, it's just that the page is extremely inefficient and prevents the Garbage Collector from throwing things away which affects every browser]
3) As always, not using leaky extensions is a good idea.

In other words, they have reduced the memory footprint not by tackling whatever process is hoarding memory like Scrat stacking acorns in his giant hollow tree, but by throwing away items that use memory but are otherwise static (images).

The funny part is that devs actually checked, and a majority of the Firefox crashes due to running out of memory were caused by something like 60+% of RAM being filled with decoded images. On the other hand, you are close to a point but don't actually know enough about Firefox to see it. Firefox uses its own internal image processing library (ImageLib), this library is a giant outdated turd that is very inefficient. Unfortunately, Mozilla only has like 3 people who understand that pile of crap and can fix it, all of them decided it would be more fun to work on Azure instead.

Until ImageLib is fixed, Firefox's "throw all the images away" feature is the best that front-line devs can do to keep the image memory usage under control. Eventually ImageLib is going to load images on demand in the background which should eliminate all the problems related to images (both memory and performance).

Re:who gives a fuck by amicusNYCL · 2012-07-08 04:52 · Score: 1

It's advanced, I know.

--
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black

Browser cache vs memory leaks by Reziac · 2012-07-08 05:49 · Score: 1

For the past few months I've had to do a lot of Comparing Stuff Online, and that leads to as many as 25-30 tabs open 24 hours a day for 2-3 weeks at a time (any given tab is not closed til I don't need the info anymore, because when it's closed I may lose it entirely -- the pages expire, and it's a nuisance to save and reload the info).

[Speaking of Seamonkey v2.5 here] This itself did not use a huge amount of memory... what DID was the stupid cache management. Cache might have 2500 directories and 1500 files (no, that's not a typo)... WTF is with that? So I started tracking it, and the amount of cruft in the cache, mainly as empty directories, or directories with only a single file in them, was directly associated with increasing memory use. With only 4 or 5 tabs open but a "full" cache (all 100mb hacked up into a couple thousand directories) it leaks about 100mb per day. If I cleared cache after every session, then memory use was only about 120mb even with a lot of tabs open. If I didn't, memory use would just keep growing and growing (at one point it hit 1200mb, even with only 4 or 5 tabs open). This memory is not recovered until the browser is shut down and cache cleared.

Thanks to the stupid cache handling, I finally found a RAMdisk that works on WinXP and now SM's cache is on that. Its fragmentation on the HD was ridiculous, especially since it has the thousands of useless directories thing. At least it doesn't matter if the RAMdisk is fragmented all to hell (well, it does, but it only impacts itself).

--
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?

Re: swapless by Reziac · 2012-07-08 05:54 · Score: 1

I ran swapless for many years too, and the only reason I started allowing it again is because of stupid Photoshop filters that complain "not enough memory" if they don't find a swapfile. You are so right, the whole system is SO much more responsive without a swapfile (and even so sometimes on low-RAM systems).

Tho it occurs to me that since I use a RAMdisk to mitigate SM/FF's dreadful cache management, I could put a little tiny swapfile on the RAMdisk for those Stupid Filters to find...

--
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?

IE has an unfair memory advantage... by Shirley+Marquez · 2012-07-08 05:55 · Score: 2

It's not surprising that IE9 uses the least memory for one tab. Because of its privileged place in the OS (some of the code is also used for other purposes), a lot of its code is already in memory before you even launch it, so the incremental cost of opening that first tab is reduced.

Re:Lower RAM usage, so? How about CPU? by lpq · 2012-07-08 06:06 · Score: 1

+10 to the above author!!!

I've complained about this in FF for 10 years!.....

I've never been concerned about memory... and now with 48G, like I care about the fact that 32-bit FF is staying below 2G!... Screw that!

What I care about is that with 30-50 tabs open in 5-8 windows, how much CPU on my 6-core machine does it use? Max? 16.666666666%.

Never has been. When will they multi-thread each java instance? For that matter, when will they run each site in it's own process? If a site includes stuff from another site, it's still on the main site, but if it opens a sub window like an IFRAME, that could be another...certain my pages browsing on slashdot shouldn't be affected by my pages on some high cpu using site that uses complex, real-time, timer-driven, javascript that does screen updates with every keystroke...

But it's all in 1 java event loop because for 10 years it's been "too hard" to make things multi-process. They have multiple threads, but it's only 1 thread that is ever dominating the cpu. They even split out media players into separate processes -- which did ZIP -- unless you have a media player playing your video in background while you browse another site! How often do people play video in background while browsing other sites?

It may help the video site -- from all the other background processes that run in background, but all my windows can be closed and FF still uses "15-30%" of 1 CPU (I hate that windows likes to hide those numbers by dividing by #processors... it makes it harder to see how much cpu a process is taking. On a 12-cpu machine, (2 6-cores), 100% cpu usage
is reflected by 6.7%. For displays that round to the nearest integer, you don't see usage under 8.7% (rounds to 0). Yet all those procs using 0% cpu are active and wiping your memory caches clean and you wonder why performance sucks..?

I much prefer displays that show me 100%/cpu. so on a 12 cpu machine,
if 3 are used, I'll see 300% cpu usage. What else do you you call 9 seconds of cpu time used in 3 seconds of real time?

Re:Firefox throwing out the baby with the bath wat by adiposity · 2012-07-08 11:15 · Score: 1

In other words, they have reduced the memory footprint not by tackling whatever process is hoarding memory like Scrat stacking acorns in his giant hollow tree, but by throwing away items that use memory but are otherwise static (images).

More to the point, they are throwing away data that might actually be useful, apparently in an attempt to cover for data that they can't figure out how to garbage collect.

As a long time Firefox user (since Phoenix 0.2), my frustration got to a boiling point last week and I switched to Chrome, despite 2 or 3 things that I really prefer about Firefox (type ahead find being one). I really don't care how much RAM is being used (I have 12GB)--what drives me crazy is the UI lag that inevitably occurs after using Firefox for a few days.

The electrolysis project being put on hold for the foreseeable future basically confirms we will never see a UI responsive Firefox. I appreciate the attempts to not waste memory (especially for lower mem devices), but if doubling the amount of RAM used would somehow speed things up, I'd gladly accept using 2GB of RAM. Unfortunately, with Firefox, the more RAM, the slower the UI goes.

With Chrome, the more RAM, the more...RAM. Nothing slows down. Chrome may not be a memory saver, but it is a time saver compared to Firefox.

Re:Firefox throwing out the baby with the bath wat by hackertourist · 2012-07-08 21:36 · Score: 1

It only throws away images, not the layout tree. You only have the wait for JPEGs/PNGs to be unpacked into RAM.

All too often, the image is what I'm after. Webcomics, other image sites where I'll ctrl-click a dozen links that I expect to be loaded in the background and be ready for viewing without further delay. Instead I get the layout tree, including all of the damn ads, and I still have to wait for the part of the page I want.
I'll go fiddle with the about:config settings to see if that'll improve things.

Re:who gives a fuck by wezeldog · 2012-07-09 01:57 · Score: 1

Which looks like it confirms the original poster's statement: Mozilla doesn't ship Firefox as an .msi, just an exe. You can script the exe, but still not an .msi.

Re:who gives a fuck by amicusNYCL · 2012-07-09 05:50 · Score: 1

The third or fourth result is to a Mozilla page that directs people looking for an MSI to the first result. Mozilla doesn't distribute an MSI, but that doesn't mean there's not an MSI available.

--
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black

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