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Firefox 15 Released: Silent Updates, Compressed Textures, Add-on Memory Leak Fix
Mozilla released Firefox 15 today, and it brings a number of interesting changes. First, the browser is finally switching to a "silent" update model, like Chrome. (No doubt in answer to endless complaints about their rapid release cycle.) In addition, Mozilla says they have "now plugged the main cause of memory leaks in Firefox add-ons." Add-ons commonly hold extra copies of sites in memory when they don't need to, and the browser now has a mechanism to detect this and reclaim the memory. Another significant improvement is the addition of native support for compressed textures in WebGL, which is a boost for high-res 3D gaming. Here are release notes for the desktop and mobile versions.
Installing it now; let's hope it works! Oh and FIRST! :)
K Man
Anyone else not able to see live updates to the DOM with the developer tools?
Try this:
1. Right click on the Firefox start page (about:home) around the empty area left of the Firefox logo -> Inspect element.
2. <div id="topSection"> should be selected.
3. Open Tools -> Web Developer -> Web console.
4. Type: document.getElementById('topSection').className = 'hello';
5. Notice the view of the DOM below does not update to reflect the new className you've added.
Additionally, there doesn't seem to be a way to manually edit HTML elements (add attributes, add new HTML, etc) using the DOM inspector like you can in WebKit browsers.
Is this a bug / missing feature or am I doing it wrong?
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Did they fix Flash freezing all the time, or is that Adobe's fault?
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Last thing I need is for an idiot in some far and distant place to think it fun to roll out a new version and trigger an update on all my computers that may render all the corporate apps unusable. No, thank you. FF joins Chrome in the sandboxed "use only if indispensable" bin.
Every time Firefox upgrades, it wipes out my login cookies. It forces me to re-login to my sites. Is there a way to turn this dictator off?
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
Hope they fix the running process error before going any further, it's the next most annoying thing after WinRAR's evaluation period!
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-already-running-not-responding
I don't take this as a solution:
If Firefox did not shut down normally when you last used it, Firefox might still be running in the background, even though it is not visible. Restart your computer to see if the problem goes away.
It's been what, six years since 64-bit OSes became norm? Why can't Firefox devs make a 64-bit version?
32-bit Firefox runs like crap on Win7. I use this ajax grid in my pages, and it runs smooth as glass on XP. The same page viewed on Win7 Firefox is slow and jerky. There's something wrong with the way Firefox renders javascript when running under a 64-bit OS.
I just updated Firefox between my "Flash freezing" post above and this post here, and I didn't have to log into Slashdot again.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
Mozilla says they have "now plugged the main cause of memory leaks in Firefox add-ons."
Er, the same memory leaks they assured us weren't happening or weren't their fault?
Look, I mean you probably found a bug. The thing to do is to either post on the project mailing list or file a bug report.
Posting a comment on Slashdot is unlikely to result in a solution.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
In my browser?
From one of the links:
"Firefox 15 prevents most memory leaks caused by add-ons, including Firebug. For many users with add-ons installed this will significantly reduce Firefoxâ(TM)s memory consumption, without requiring upgrades to those add-ons."
Yeah, how's the add-on supposed to work without upgrading - Firefox 15 breaks compatibility with all previous add-ons. And to think, the guy who wrote this probably didn't think of it at all...
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
the browser is finally switching to a "silent" update model, like Chrome. (No doubt in answer to endless complaints about their rapid release cycle.
So people have been complaining about Firefox's Rapid Release Cycle -- more correctly called Rapid Version Number Inflation -- and so Firefox's solution is to continue doing it and just not tell you about it.
Brilliant.
So, does Firefox support WebGL on Linux yet?
Typical slashdot bullshit summary.
Seriously, Mozilla. Wrap your collective mind around the concept of respecting the user. You used to be really good at it. Get back to your roots.
I run LinuxMint Debian. I'm playing with Nemo on my Nokia N900. I wouldn't have a clue how to hack the kernel, but I'm also not a complete idiot. And you know what version of firefox I'm on? Five. Because I got so fracking sick of having my extensions broken and my UI messed with.
Just quit it.
to be due to the plugin-container.exe, which turns into an extreme CPU hog over-time, showing up way-high in the (windows) CPU consuming processes. (I do tend to open a lot of tabs and generate a lot of history.) (I used to have serious memory issues as well, which were greatly improved by doubling+ up to about 4+ Gig.) Is this a related or separate issue? I don't believe I am using an inordinate amount of plugins, just the standard ones.
And I should add that I've already tried 10ESR. It's so corporate-oriented, it's a pain for regular users.
I leave Firefox windows with dozens of tabs open for weeks and even months at a time, and haven't noticed any stability issues in a year or so...But I also don't use any add-ons except Firebug.
I do. Daily. 100+ tabs open is not uncommon. Firefox hasn't crashed for years. The rest of your comment is OffTopic.
It broke my Exchange plugin in Thunderbird (manual update). No company calendar for me for an unspecified time frame.
The memory improvements are nice and all, but the support for the Opus audio codec will have a much bigger impact on the Web. Opus is open source, royalty-free, and superior to previous formats in latency, flexibility, and audio quality. It handles speech, music, and general audio well, and scales fluidly from a 6kbps mono narrowband VOIP bandwidth all the way up to perceptually-transparent multichannel music. It's been approved as an IETF standard and should be published as an RFC this week.
Finally having a best-of-breed standardized codec which is universally implementable without patent royalties means that HTML5 audio - especially real-time communications - can finally take off.
Firefox is the second major end-user application to add support. (The first was the foobar2k audio player.)
So your solution to complaints about how fast you crank out updates and destabilize software that you want people to depend upon is...
Update it without asking
Congratulations, genius. You have cemented your place as my #4 browser out of 4.
How can you expect people to use your browser on a daily basis when they can't even reasonably expect the browser they launch today to be the same one they shut down yesterday?
Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. Open a lot of windows and tabs and see for yourself. Maybe you don't normally do that, but people who do research online often see Firefox instability.
At the moment it's a tie between Firefox and Chrome on that front. I normally run both Firefox and Chrome because both of them will die after some number of days of heavy tab usage (100+ tabs). Chrome has this nasty, nasty habit of forgetting your previously open tabs with no way to recover them, if for some reason it crashes again before you hit the recover button. Which is pretty common actually, for example if you reboot a couple of times. (Embarassing bug! What's up with you smart people who totally own the Chrome project?) Furthermore, if you accidentally hit the "start" button instead of "recover" it's not game over for your Firefox tabs, you can get them back just by renaming a file, or you can archive those tabs just by copying that file if you want. If there's any way to do this in Chrome, I haven't found it. For these reasons, and also Chrome's annoying insistance on forcing you to save content to disk before opening it, Firefox is my primary browser for real work and Chrome is my throwaway browser.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I leave Firefox windows with dozens of tabs open for weeks and even months at a time, and haven't noticed any stability issues in a year or so...But I also don't use any add-ons except Firebug.
You are luck. I use Firefox with firebug for webdevelopment, and although I love it, I have to restart it a couple of times daily, as Firefox easily goes to 1.6GB of memory easy. And that is with 1 window open and about 10-15 tabs only. It is very much dependent on what you are using on the tab that has firebug. Let me give you an example: I'm now developing on top of JS table\tree framework, which tends to have a lot on memory. If firebug is open it starts keeping copies of a bunch of versions of this JS plugin, each taking a couple of MB of memory. So it slows to a crawl.
--- "When you gotta do something wrong. You gotta do it right. (Fighter)"
Having run into memory problems repeatedly for years, Firefox 15 is shockingly better at memory management. They completely change the model they used to help clean up after add-ons that don't clean up after themselves and very few of them have had to be fixed to work with it. Memory usage for me has been cut by more than half.
Mozilla also went out of its way to make the updater service run with as few rights as possible with code that revokes rights that it does not need. There were about three dozen permissions explicitly dropped when it was first developed around FF12. That number may have changed slightly but it's still a long list.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Nonsense. I open literally dozens of Firefox windows with no instability at all.
Unless high memory usage is a problem in your system.
Please don't tell me you are running windows with 2Gb or some low amount like that.
A development box needs tons of ram. Sounds you are in desperate need for a 64 bit system as well.
I switched to FF 10 using "firefox aero theme for firefox 4+" and a bunch of other things like status for ever and the like. It is close, but not quite the same. Other than things like the right click menu appearing at the head of the pointer instead of the tail (causing for me to click the wrong item for) and general reverse je ne sais quoi that make me hate it.
But just wait until the ESR switches over from 10 to 17(?). Instead of changes slowly trickling in, a bunch will change at once. I can't wait for the shitstorm as that all hits the fan again.
Crash? No. Come to a complete stop for 10 seconds while doing nothing more but scrolling? Yes.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Oh hey, look, it runs great for you. Guess we can ignore everyone else now!
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
12GB costs less than 100 bucks - if you're so rich you can afford to work off of a laptop -oh wait - here's the deal - use a desktop, it's cheaper, and easier to upgrade.
Are you an IE 6 user as well?
I'm Sorry but 2gb IS a low amount of memory. $60 for 4gb ddr2 or $25 for ddr3. A far cry from $1000.
My experience with FF is even worse than yours. I could get painful slowdowns just using the browser, without multiple windows, for an hour or two. The Windows task manager shows it using over a gigabyte. The blame has to belong to one of my plugins, but which one? I've tried selective disabling, with no luck.
I gave up on FF a few months ago. I'd resisted the move to Chrome for years (not enough plugins, too much GUI cleverness) but the aggravation of repeated slowdowns, freezes, and crashes was finally too much for me. It didn't help the FF updates included lame GUI changes that were poorly thought out and whose only merit was that they made FF look more like Chrome.
This announcement sort of tempts me. Yeah, fixes to the memory leak nonsense have been announced before, but this is the first time they've claimed to fix leaks in the plugin environment. Still, having made the painful transition to Chrome, I don't feel strongly motivated to move back.
What you describe is solely due to Firebug, and it's kind of a side-effect of it's features, not truely a bug that should be resolved.
I would recommend you simply run 2 firefox sessions.
Setup firefox with 2 profiles
- keep the Default profile for your regular browsing, enable day-to-day addons like adblock, pretty theme, no firebug)
- Create a development profile, enable firebug and the like, different homepage, no adblock etc, firebug enabled
Alter the Shortcut(s) on your desktop so you have 2 firefox shortcuts, one starting with the default profile /-P default/, and the other one automatically using the developer profile (also use the no-remote commandline switch for this one).
Now you simply have 2 firefox sessions, the developer one has a seperate (boring) theme so its easy to recognise and you can reboot it whenever you feel like it. The default profile has your regular browsing tabs and you can leave this running for months (i do, never any probs). Whenever you click a hyperlink in an external application they will all open in your regular browsing session (even if that firefox wasnt running yet) due to the no-remote flag on the developer shortcut.
It might take you a few days to get used to doing your developing in the seperate browsing session, but you'll be used to it after that and you'll love it. I do web development myself aswell and use a similar setup. Some additional benefits:
- I love adblock/noscript/etc for regular browsing sessions, and now that my development is done in a seperate session (without those addons) i no longer have those weird situations where i add stuff to a site i'm working on and it doesnt show due to being adblocked.
- If you manage to do really wicked shit during development and cause a race condition or browser crash or the like (not likely for regular HTML/JS stuff, but start messing with native client, vrml, plugins or other less common parts and it can happen), your regular browsing session doesn't get affected.
- My regular profile has Google as homepage, my development profile has my current project as homepage
- I spend a lot of time everyday inside my browser (like most ppl here), so i like to tweak every little thing to my taste, having seperate profiles means my development profile can remain mostly "factory default" eliminating the chance that some weird shit i did to firefox is having an effect on the page im developing.
mail me the 1000 bucks for a new laptop asshole
Your laptop has an asshole?
What's wrong with it?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Downloaded in 12 seconds....untarred it in a sub directory in my /home/me/programs, made a desktop link to the firefox binary...not firefox-bin. Added the binary to the Mint menu with a simple menu edit.
CDed into ~/home/me/programs/firefox and tried ./firefox first. It came up in less than 2 seconds from command line. Am writing this as I use it.
Eat your heart out windows users as you click through all the "are you sure you want to allow this program crap"
On Linux the use and custom install of firefox is so easy even a windows sys admin might get the idea.
Oh hey, look, it works for everyone else, guess we can ignore you then!
Your post seems to have lost its focus halfway through, but I have to also add my 2 cents to the stability issue. I don't understand why people always say they have problems opening lots of tabs/windows in Firefox. I find it to be just the opposite - I can open (and more importantly _leave_ open) dozens to 100+ tabs without an issue or really any slowdown at all. On the other hand, Chrome can choke with as little as a dozen tabs.
This has been my experience on numerous systems, on all three major OS platforms, and with every version of Firefox since 3.x or so (whenever they launched the session restore feature). In addition, Firefox is the only browser I trust: IE is tied way too heavily to Microsoft, Google is beginning to scare me more everyday, and Safari has usability issues though it includes some powerful tools as well.
I'll update to Firefox 15 when I see it in /usr/ports/www/firefox
When you reopen Chrome after it has crashed, try using Ctrl+Shift+T. Most of the time, it will open the last opened window. If you keep doing it, it will keep bringing previously opened Windows/Tabs.
I've been using Chromium for years, and have been very happy with it. The final straw that made me give up on Firefox was the way it handles self-signed certificates: it gave the me choice of either not viewing the site (and therefore not getting any work done), or else going through a long and fiddly process that would add the certificate to my list of ultimately trusted root certificates. There was no option for 'as I am not doing anything which requires security right now the status of the certificate is irrelevant to me so go ahead'. As at the time I was doing a lot of research on mailing list archives, and one very common mailing list setup would redirect http to https and would install a self-signed certificate, this was actually preventing me getting work done.
Has this behaviour improved any recently?
Which they keep breaking every few releases, and it takes several more releases before it's fixed.
For example, I have Slashdot as an RSS feed. After visiting a link, the feed doesn't get updated, unless I right-click and select "Reload Live Bookmark".
The bug is filed here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=766799
I would recommend an endoscopy for your old laptop asshole.
I have about 10 tabs open throughout the day. At the end of the day, the browser starts to slow down to the point that a restart is necessary to refresh it.
Just because it has a memory leak doesn't mean it will crash. But using more than 1 GB of memory is not really needed, especially when after a restart the memory usage goes to between 200-300 MBs. And yes, it still retains my history for each tab, which I can visit just as well by pressing the BACK button.
I don't understand the need to keep all my history cached in memory.
Hopefully you have filed a bug about the issue you see.
First test if FF15 fixes the issue (it does fix *a lot* of addon related memory leaks), but if not please file a bug.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core
Firefox is a memory pig - I am typically running 15 - 20, even 30 tabs at a time, and it's typically grabbing 3+Gig of memory (flash is a massive hog, too). I can live with that, but what I can't stand are the updates. Every time I update, I lose more than I gain. I used to blindly allow firefox to apply updates, but not any more, certainly not after the bitches disabling the handy print to .pdf key functionality.
And today, when I went to check for this update mentioned here, I see that 10+ plug-ins will lose functionality if I 'upgrade' - uh, no thanks, that's not progress
Sounds like it has a case of memoroids!
Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. Open a lot of windows and tabs and see for yourself.
The "count tabs" command in Ubiquity claims I currently have 735 tabs. I've had over 300 tabs on average for the past 9-12 months, and I'm not running into stability problems or even the long delays others have mentioned.
I use Debian (testing), which is currently distributing Firefox 10 (ESR). I don't run many addons, though; mostly NoScript and Flashblock. Maybe the problem isn't Firefox, it's your choice of addons or OS.
I'm sorry but 2gb is plenty of memory. It only seems low because of the damn bloatware you're used to.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Damn! I shouldn't have switched from Opera to Firefox 15.
If they're stupid like you? Yes. Please link to your bug report or get the fuck out. Either A. You don't have a genuine problem or B. You don't care enough to do anything about it. Why should anyone care about your problem?
Firefox crashes randomly when I play Youtube videos.
IE does not.
I don't think they will ever fix that for me, since I am still running windows XP.
Oh come on now, I just finally allowed 14 to be installed on my PC. I delay because every release now breaks something, most annoyingly it's the themes that get broken even when the UI didn't apparently change at all!
The nice thing about browsers friend? Is you do have choices. I personally prefer the Comodo Dragon, which is based on Chromium and doesn't have all the Google phone home junk. For those that wish to try it here you go. And for those that prefer the Gecko engine or have FF extensions you are loathe to let go of? Well guess what, the Comodo guys just came out with their own version of FF called IceDragon, try it here.
Oh and since we get lets of calls of shilling here just FYI, don't know anybody at Comodo, never worked at Comodo or got so much as a bumper sticker from Comodo, just a guy that used their free antivirus and decided to see what other free stuff they had and found a ton of cool free software being offered.
But that's the nice thing we have now folks, we have a wealth of choice. Don't like either of those? There is SWIron, Kmeleon, Safari, Opera, hell I could make a list half a page long just of browsers. If you don't like the way the FF devs are doing things, and personally I think trying to throw another mobile OS into an already crowded as hell field is just nuts, then vote with your feet and choose one of the multitude of different browsers out there. Hell they are free, try a dozen and see which one fits you best.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Firefox has certainly improved for me. More so with the rapid release cycle. 15 so far is looking pretty good. But I'm still waiting on it to show up for Ubuntu. But my Mac and Windows machines are up to date.
My local development database CentOs VM with a stripped down dataset is larger than your plenty of memory.
That's not where you put the beginning of your comment.
You must have forgotten what I said between reading my comment and your reply. The short answer (since any other kind might overtax your reading comprehension) is "No."
FF15 has crashed 77 times in the last 20 mins since installing it.
Yes, exactly! The high memory usage comes from firebug. If you really have so little memory, then you'll be much better off running 2 separate instances of Firefox. In both my own testing and Tom's latest browser Firefox turn out on top with the lowest memory footprint.
http://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/memoryusage3wbgp11,0101-343668-0-2-3-1-png-.html
Best 40 tab - Firefox 794 MB
Worst 40 tab - Chrome 1449 MB
Chrome used almost twice the memory as Firefox.
It leaks memory and other stuff!
And it works ok, but it has some annoy-o-glitches in it. I'm glad they addressed the memory leaks though. There were times I could watch memory just get eaten up by Firefox just going to Google. And the silent upgrade/update - no thank you!
Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. Open a lot of windows and tabs and see for yourself. Maybe you don't normally do that, but people who do research online often see Firefox instability.
I almost always have no less than 10 tabs open, and more often than not have multiple tab groups across multiple windows. Firefox crashes maybe once or twice a month for me, even though I use it almost every day.
I have a hypothesis that everyone screaming "memory leaks" either doesn't understand what a memory leak is, or is using a plugin that is causing the leak. I've left Firefox open for weeks at a time, yet it never consumes any more or less memory without opening or closing another tab.
The only real gripe I have with Firefox is the same gripe I have with all other tabbed browsers. The damn tabs don't split into multiple lines of tabs forcing me to scroll through them to find the particular one I'm looking for at any given time. Tab groups were a huge step up to solving this, but still only reduced the problem.
Yeah, if it weren't for all those pesky things you want your computer to do, it would be more than enough.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Who's out of touch? I bought a brand-new laptop two years ago with 4GB of RAM for just over $600, and it was only that much because I wanted a decent video card in it.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
The problem isn't the chips, its the boards. Most boards today have only 2 slots, 4 if you are lucky. That means for a DDR2 board you are maxed at 4-8Gb of RAM (4Gb chips are nearly a hundred a pop for DDR2 so not practical) and with DDR3 you are talking 8Gb-16Gb (again the 8Gb sticks are too high to be practical) so you just aren't gonna be able to stuff that much RAM.
And an even better question is...Why the fuck should I have to? Its a damned browser, not Crysis 2. if your ass is leaking memory so bad i need a shitton of memory just to deal with the thing? Then go back to the drawing board because your browser sucks.
I'm typing this on a 1.8GHz Sempron I keep at the shop for a nettop, its got 2Gb of RAM and with a half a dozen tabs open in Comodo Dragon and a couple of programs running in the background I have nearly half my memory left. I have left this running for a week with more than a half a dozen tabs open and what happened? it was using the same amount of memory as I left. I have done the same to FF overnight and found the machine to be slapping the shit out of the paging file the next day as FF usage slowly but surely climbs over time.
So if you need a server board with 32Gb of RAM to do any real work in your browser? then people need to move to a browser that doesn't go through memory like a drunk goes through a free minibar, because a browser frankly shouldn't be sucking down RAM like that.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I tend to only close firefox when mayor updates come out on my desktop. It does eat up memory when I've lots of tabs+windows open, but I've never seen it become unstable.
It's funny but on another thread about how the PC is dying people are saying that a four year old PC is enough for most people. Clearly it's not enough to run Firefox.
And your point is what exactly? You're not going to fit the entire thing into your RAM are you?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Its slamming the CPU friend, use something like AnVir Task Manager where you can have a little CPU and memory gauge in the taskbar and see for yourself. I was driven nuts by those "senior moments" as I called it but then by chance giveaway of the day gave away AnVir and the next time I saw FF have a senior moment i looked at the taskbar and found it had slammed the CPU into the red. They have a trial version so its not like you have to pay for it and I bet my last dollar its slamming the hell out of your CPU.
That's why I spent about a month trying different browsers, Safari and Opera and SWIron and Chrome and Kmeleon and settled on Comodo Dragon. Out of all the different ones i tested it seemed to work best for me across multiple systems while still having the features i wanted like Adblock Plus.
So get AnVir or any other taskbar CPU monitor and next time it hangs look at the gauge and see what it says, if its hanging the CPU try some different browsers and see what works best for you. Because i don't know about you but those senior moments drove me up a damned wall, it always felt like someone holding up a stop sign every so many minutes and taking me out of my groove, really irritating.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Daily. 100+ tabs open is not uncommon.
That's cute. What do those tab contain? Try 4 different rutorrent windows for instance.
Firefox has certainly improved for me. More so with the rapid release cycle. 15 so far is looking pretty good. But I'm still waiting on it to show up for Ubuntu. But my Mac and Windows machines are up to date.
Waiting for a ubuntu release is nonsense just download the tar and run it in your home directory. Hint the binary is in /firefox and can be run directly. It will even use your current flash plugin install and all your settings will be in place because they are stored in the hidden /home/~you/.mozilla directory.
You do not have to system install batshit with linux if you do not wish to do so...
Some people have a laptop asshole and some have one on the bottom.
This release is FUBAR..... Mandatory Tabs on top WTF????????? If i wanted to use #@$@#!!!%^&&@#!@! Chrome or IE I would!!!! DAMN YOU MOZILLA..
http://www.frys.com/product/6992727?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG $90 for 16GB is hardly "too high to be practical". I also question many peoples claims on memory usage. My kid will load half a dozen tabs and leave them running for days at a time with no problems. Pages loaded with Flash no less, and he doesn't have the problems. My suspicion is that there is some specific, semi-common use case that leaks memory. Something like running some plugin that leaks memory.
The headline reads:
Firefox 15 Released: Silent Updates, Compressed Textures, Add-on Memory Leak Fix
The Related Links at the page bottom has:
12 Dead, 50 Injured at The Dark Knight Rises Showing In Colorado
Concidence? I think not...
Just like you're ignoring the majority who don't have a problem just because you want to cry a little, instead of bugging Mozilla with a bug report? Stop clogging up Slashdot with this nonsense, and do the right thing. Uninstall Firefox, and use another browser, so you can find something new to bitch about.
I haven't updated to the latest version yet because yet again the theme I prefer to use is not compatible with the latest release. When last I updated the theme I had been using made the interface a complete garbled mess and I had to restart it in safe-mode and manually purge and reinstall all my addons and themes before it would behave correctly once more. At that time at least I knew the cause as I had just accepted an update, if it does it silently it may be a bit more confusing when something either goes bonkers or just silently stops working. What I would want is for some kind of set API or backwards compatibility that themes and addons can use so that the authors don't have to update every single time FF does.
Some people have a laptop asshole and some have one on the bottom.
Thus the desire to get to the bottom of things.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
I was so excited when I heard about this focus on memory leakage. But I've been on the 15 beta releases and it leaks worse than 13x.
It does not matter that I close all but one window/tab. After 24 hours of light browsing, it is pushing 1.5 GB and can rarely run for more than 48 hours. I am running debian squeeze.
So what is the support path? How does this get fixed?
I found worse than Firefox is Flash. For whatever reason on one of my computers Flash is an utter pig on any browser: Firefox, Chrome, IE. It will keep gobbling up RAM until the VM space of the flash plugin reaches 2GB, then crash. Even after every tab with flash is closed it will continue to occupy RAM. I don't understand how flash can bog a computer down so much. It chugs away at the CPU too. A 640p FLV file will purr along at 30% CPU usage on a PIII playing in VLC for crying out loud! What's going on? I've tried reinstalling browsers and Flash plug in.
It is called the "User" (TM).
I do. Daily. 100+ tabs open is not uncommon.
Do you use the treetab plugin? One reason I ditched Chrome was the removal of side tabbing.
46137
People still care about firefox?
I definitely can get bad performance with Firefox when leaving it open for weeks at a time with many tabs. Just killed and restarted it today when it stopped working right. So you're right that it didn't crash but it did stop behaving properly and it sped up tremendously after being restarted.
So, when are they going to do SOMETHING about that, or at least recognize the issue?
I'm absolutely tired of the Mozilla dev team making a middle finger gesture at these errors and basically saying "Well, get your certs in order!" Only, the certs we are talking about are automatically generated on devices like HP switches, HP ILO modules or NetApp filers, I can't even touch them without a serious hacking and risking breaking a pretty darn expensive piece of equipment. AND only because the FF devs have a fetish about making the CERT ISSUE page as tedious as possible.
I just found out I'm running 15. (Kubuntu, some experimental repositories enabled, and I still do most of my updating by 'sudo apt-get' on the command line, so I genuinely didn't know - I thought I was still on FF 13 until I looked just now). You can go more bleeding edge with the buntus, for example for Kubuntu, try adding "ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports" to your repository list, and the others should be someting similar. If you want the absolute latest, your best bet is to learn enough about repositories to add new ones to the standard lists and then let a modern graphical app manager take care of it for you - I'm just old fashioned I guess, but you can generally have the absolute latest and shiniest pretty damned fast if you want to bother.
I suspect FF 15 will be the default available in the October Ubuntu/Ku/Xu/Edu/Myth etc. cycle. For me, firefox was running OK 6 months ago, it still seems to run OK in the new iteration, and so I guess I'll have even fewer memory hog issues with it from now on, but i'm at over 60 days continuous uptime as is, and that was a reboot for a new kernel, so how will I really know? I'm very happy for all of you that the new version helps.
Who is John Cabal?
Are you mad or stupid? I can do TONs of things in development with 2GB or less.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
There's the occasional very brief stutter, but on the whole it's just fine. Certainly nothing I'd complain about.
If your laptop can't handle more than 2 GB of RAM, it is so old that any $300 notebook that can handle 8 GB or more of RAM (and probably comes with 4 GB) will outperform it in every performance metric. And I just got 8 GB of low voltage DDR3-1600 cas 9 SO-DIMMS from newegg for $48. And if your DEVELOPMENT box isn't making you enough money to justify spending either of those two numbers, get out of the development business, because it should easily be paying for something 4x more expensive.
If you aren't doing development, then don't worry about it.
Subj sez it all... So far, disappointing...
They've since updated their extension checking scheme so that their new versions don't break everybody's extensions...
Crash? No. Come to a complete stop for 10 seconds while doing nothing more but scrolling? Yes.
My recent experience has been that if you kill the adobe flash process when this happens, Firefox magically jumps back to life.
First of all that is the higher specc'd gamer memory, a lot of borards simply won't run that, and $10 less than $100 is still close enough to be in the "not practical" and also ignores the fact that DDR3 only took off in the last year and a half so many boards that are still doing great are DDR2 which is insane for anything larger than 2Gb. Finally you'll also have to figure an OS upgrade into that, since most machines come with Home which supports a MAX of 16Gb including VRAM, so you won't be able to use around 1.2Gb of that until you spend the $140 to upgrade to pro.
But I've seen FF slap swap like a pimp slapping his ho enough times to know there is something wrong there. I have left Dragon, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and Kmeleon open for days at a time and when I come back they are using the same amount of RAM they were when I left, not so with FF. Not running any rare or bizarre extensions either, just the standard ABP and NoScript that everyone here always says to run.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Set it back to the old 50MB size and empty on close and you wont have the memory leak and yes it does work correctly on a Win7 system with a mear 2GB of memory that sees lots of flash (neopets/yahoo games). Hell I saw the change back in 4.0 and reset the damn thing back to 50Mb as that's all I need for temp internet files in firefox or IE
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
I dunno, I've got only 2GB of RAM in my machine, and it does just fine. That's not to say I don't notice the lack, but I can watch a movie on one monitor while playing a modern game on the other, without either suffering significantly. I think that 2GB is the absolute minimum I'd build a computer with.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
It seems like Mozilla keeps insisting on taking some stupid course with development, or implementing some stupid feature, and then spending the next several cycles trying to fix all the regressions that the stupidity caused. Hiding "http://" in the URL bar is a perfect example. There are dozens of bugs where this stupid idea is causing all kinds of headaches for people who just want to use their damned browser. Now Mozilla wastes cycles trying to fix all these issues instead of improving some of the bugs that have been around over a decade and have more votes than anything else.
"Mozilla says they have 'now plugged the main cause of memory leaks in Firefox add-ons.' "
They've been claiming something like this for 13 versions. I'll believe it when I see it.
> At the moment it's a tie between Firefox and Chrome on that front.
> I normally run both Firefox and Chrome because both of them will
> die after some number of days of heavy tab usage (100+ tabs).
Oh good, I thought it was just me. When Safari gets past 100 tabs (I read a lot of sites with a lot of links (like Slashdot), open new tabs, shrink them, and then MAYBE I get around to reading them someday) it starts to bog down badly. After many days or a few weeks, it can get to the point where it runs fine for a while, but if I come back to it after another intensive task (Photoshop, watching a video, etc.) it'll just grind and grind and grind on the disk. It might take 5-10 minutes to recover. (Then I break down, take some time, and close tabs.) I was wondering if I should switch. Glad to hear I don't have to. :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Last session I saved had 356 tabs in 5 windows.
Firefox worked fine with that number of tabs as soon as disabled Firebug. Before that, it chewed up so much CPU and memory as Firebug tried to debug every request made by all those AJAX calls.
Oh, and I have NoScript too, and disable javascript and flash except for a few sites.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Try it. Check out the user feedback near the bottom of https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/07/19/firefox-15-plugs-the-add-on-leaks/ -- people have experienced greatly reduced memory consumption, faster painting and scrolling, and fewer pauses.
Extension compatibility hasn't been a problem since Firefox 10; the max version is now automatically bumped. Furthermore, Firefox 4, 5, and 6 were kind of sucky releases, esp. in terms of memory consumption. Firefox 15 is a much better browser. UI changes since 5 have been minimal. It's also not full of security holes the way older versions now are. You should try it.
Sigh. I've already installed the update, but I feel no motivation at all to take it for a spin. I've gotten used to Chrome's quirks and limitations, and don't have a lot of incentive to go back. Now, if this had happened just a couple months ago.
But I didn't. And jeez, it took them 7 years to fix a really basic bug. To heck with it.
Gah. I have 4GB of RAM on my Core 2 Duo and there have been two process shrinks since. It should be possible to get 16GB of RAM for the same price I bought my 4GB by now. Which makes sense considering the other poster showed you can buy it for less than $100 USD. Not that a browser should use a lot of memory. But then again I use Firefox and I do not notice any memory issues.
His laptop is probably an iPaq or something else where the memory is soldered to the main board and everything is glued together inside the case. Not even a genius can upgrade his laptop memory!
s/iPad/iPad
Uhmmmm...
It's not as bad ever since they put the plugins in a separate process ages ago. I can't stand Chrome or other WebKit browsers scrolling. I use the mouse wheel all the time and it is seriously not smooth.
Best 40 tab - Firefox 794 MB
Now leave it sitting like that for a week. Try it with 1 tab even. Firefox is buggy as hell.
In that case, I'd hate to see what happens when it crashes and initiates a memory dump
Or you could just scratch all that and use Chrome, whose debugger is awesome and doesn't suffer from any of those problems.
"The tabs don't split into multiple lines of tabs..."
Try the Tab Mix Plus extension. Choose this setting:
Tab Mix Plus > Options > Display > Tab Bar > When tabs don't fit width > Multi-row
The reason Firefox is ultra important to human development at present is that it has so many excellent extensions.
Well, in production environments you might very well want to keep your entire database in RAM for performance reasons, and thus you might want to do the same thing on your development machine.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
> leave this running for months (i do,
? Not to pick yo out, but, why do you? Every other post some d00d will say the same, but, you know what, why? I don't let anything running for long periods. Well, save two things that I always "hack" to clean up after it's "leaks;" my dog, my refrigerator O! and and my alarm clock. Dasit.
Everything else is just turned off, sometime, soon, not later, why? Leave. It. Running. This whole machismo scheisse reminds me of uptime---Who The Fuck Cares---real men upgrade---often---even OBSD needs it. It speaks for itself. But hey, keep spouting, at least one homey out there will see this and laugh in agreement.
My daily-use laptop has a 1.83GHz Pentium-M with a couple of megs of cache. It only supports 2GB of DDR2. It's got a modem (that I do actually use from time to time), 802.11a/b/g, and a 1920x1200 display, integrated Bluetooth, and a video card that does just fine with whatever I throw at it.
So I went looking at walmart.com, home of the modern cheap-shit namebrand computer. They have a $298 Compaq with an AMD E300 which is only just marginally faster with its two cores (the old single-core Pentium-M will run single-threaded apps faster). It has no modem mentioned, no Bluetooth, no 802.11a (and thus no 5.7GHz radio at all), and certainly doesn't have a 1920x1200 display. It does have a bigger hard drive, but whoopdie-do: Mine's only half-full after more than half a decade of slogging.
For $300, it sure doesn't seem like an upgrade at all... even if it can support more RAM.
I'm sure I can find a suitable upgrade for more money, but one that outperforms my old 2GB-max machine "in every performance metric" for $300? It doesn't look that way.
Kid-proof tablet..
At the risk of killing my Slashdot cred: I love Firefox.
I have not noticed any memory leak problems, my 15+ Add-Ons have not broken with FF updates, I do not care what version they call it (major or minor number updates) and I can not remember when it last crashed on me.
Can somebody PLEASE find the corporate spy from microsoft working at Mozilla and get them?!
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Funny but Dragon has always been smooth as butter for me, but remember there is other browsers based on Gecko, Pale Moon and IceDragon just to name two.
And they can waste mod points all they want but not 15 minutes after i first posted about FF's senior moments being CPU slams I updated it to 15, what happened? By the third tab I saw senior moments, especially when browsing through my bookmarks. Seriously WTF? Slamming the CPU to 100% just going through the bookmarks? I have the exact same bookmarks in Dragon and I can slide through the list all day, never a senior moment, not one. I even tried killing the extensions and it STILL had senior moments.
As it is I'll still be handing Dragon out to customers, because I can't recommend FF on anything less than a 3GHz multicore, and certainly not on laptops. All those CPU slams just kills battery life , I get nearly an hour more on my EEE netbook by sticking with Dragon over FF.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm using version Mosaic 2.0.
"I think this line is mostly filler"
It kind of bugs me how, despite not using any "web apps", my browser is consistently the most memory hungry of all the applications I have open these days. Although memory is cheap (if you have a good enough board), I'm not entirely fond of this trend, and hope this increased focus on reducing memory usage keeps things sane for a while. Just have to hope websites don't start demanding more resources as well.
Crud, I lost a good reply to you by accidentally hitting the back button on my mouse.
Probably was tl:dr and too lazy to type it all out again so: a Pentium-M@1.83 GHz would be a 2004-era Dothan. If you think, just because it has a higher clock frequency than the 2011-era E300@1.3 GHz, it is faster than the E300 even on single threaded apps, you haven't spent enough time learning/understanding computer architecture (To approach the E300, you need a 2007/8-era Conroe-L).
Nor should you probably need to, but if I had to guess you probably aren't doing paying code development work on that machine, either, which was what this thread was talking about- not using 56K modems.
(keep your eyes open for an Asus Aspire V5-531 on sale, I got mine for $302 including sales tax in Texas. Performance-wise, it does destroy a Dothan-class CPU in every meaningful benchmark, single or multi-threaded, but I have to admit I would kill for 1920x1200 at times and that isn't going to happen at the $300 mark, you are right)
I know I've wanted to drill my laptop a new asshole many times.
I switched to Chrome because it was noticeably faster than FF at the time and I was fed up with Mozilla ignoring speed improvements and those memory problems in favor of a bloated, overfeatured tank. That speed differential has narrowed however; FF quickly realized it would soon cease to exist if it didn't catch up to Chromium.
Now I miss FF bookmark tagging. This makes organizing and finding bookmarks so much better. Chrome doesn't have bookmark tags and if it did you can bet these would not be compatible with FF. Bookmark tagging doesn't seem much but it's very powerful.
Pauses/lockups for a few seconds are DNS problems...
the dns resolver blocks the GUI and there is one open bug for that and its being worked on to remove this old limitation.
the most common way to show up the bug is using a proxy.pac (or similar) file where it needs to resolve a site (or a rDNS) to find what proxy should use. This causes frequent lockups when the remote dns is slow or not operational.
in normal browsing and some plugins, might also show up this, when trying to use a slow DNS server (or slow NS for that domain)
please search the bugzilla for the dns resolve problems if you want to track the issue. but again, this is one old bug and its finally being worked on
Higuita
You are totally full of crap. You didn't "point out that there is a low latency niche that this codec COULD fill," you had to have two different posters bash you over the head with that fact before you acknowledged it. I didn't claim Opus "would end up on every PMP and other consumer device" either; I talked about HTML5 use and real-time communications. Try reading and understanding before you start spouting bull.
Apple had very little to do with the rise of H.264; its very large technical superiority over DIVX and other previous codecs, its early-to-market advantage over VC-1, Theora, and VP8, its use on Blu-ray, and the appearance of a best-of-breed free encoder (x.264) all contributed a heck of a lot more than Apple. Apple has been a big factor in AAC adoption due to iTunes, but that doesn't mean they have that kind of power with any other market niche. Steve Jobs' comment about Flash didn't make any change in the Flash vs HTML5 war at all, and the impact of Apple's stance regarding Flash on iDevices has only been to slightly accelerate an existing trend.
You rant and rave about how Apple is God and then you accuse everybody else of having drunk the Koolaid? Go get your head examined.
Steve Jobs designed it, put his soul into it.
Then verify the cert and accept it permanently. ie Get your certs in order. Do you complain about SSH yammering about changed certs too? The warning is there for a good reason.
They actually fixed, many, many of these bugs.
This isn't just one bug, they fixed in this one release.
New things are always on the horizon
Not sure why, but in my case the Ubuntu machine at home got the Firefox 15 release even before the Windows machine at work.
New things are always on the horizon
I've been using the Memory Fox addon for the past several months, and it has worked great. Reclaims memory like.. a really good memory reclaiming thing.
Thank you for this! Never occurred to me to use a separate profile for dev work.
It seems to me that a memory leak that causes the application to slow down, freeze, and crash is pretty basic. And yet it took them 7 years to fix it. That's pretty unimpressive.
If they had fixed this bug just a few months earlier, I wouldn't have gotten terminally frustrated and switched to Chrome — this year. But given the flaky history of Firefox, I suspect something would have driven me away eventually.
There's a really simple way to stop the WinRAR evaluation period notice.
True but I was on my way to bed and knew it'd show up the time I woke up so why not just install it with the other updates I ignored earlier this week?
At least some of the mirrors are regional so FF is probably in one of those and annoying I suspect the GB mirror got the new files at the end of the day or my net connection was being funny.
The VM's ram footprint is larger than the amount of memory he listed.
s/iPad/iPad
Uhmmmm...
s/s\/iPad\/iPad/s\/iPaq\/iPad/
Miller Lite tastes like water that's somehow managed to rot.
No, I do not think that. I could care less about clock speed, and it is not a factor in my comparison.
I think that because they benchmark rather similarly with the E300 being only somewhat faster, but relying on two cores to accomplish this, that my old box will indeed be faster for single-threaded tasks.
If you think differently, you haven't spent enough time using multi-processor computers with single-threaded applications.
Kid-proof tablet..
In that case, I'd hate to see what happens when it crashes and initiates a memory dump
BS OD
Sauce of milk to table three.
The issue is, you cannot accept a cert from an IP that had a different cert accepted before. You get sec_error_reused_issuer_and_serial and that's the end of the line until you delete the previous cert. I would have no problem if I could accept the changed cert like in SSH!
It hasn't "automatically blown up" extensions since Firefox 10, back in January 2012.
I've just about had it with Firefox. FF15's automatic update again broke at least one of my essential add-ons (Tabkit). Furthermore they have made it nearly impossible for a reasonable user to figure out how to downgrade. Mozilla's development behavior is reprehensible--it is reckless to repeatedly break API contracts with every release as they have. Their management needs to read a book on responsible API development. I am so ready to dump FF as soon as someone else develops a hierarchical tab plugin for an alternate browser.
If it worked for "everyone else" then there wouldn't still be people complaining would there? I don't have problems of the same magnitude the GP had, but Firefox has run like shit in comparison to Chrome for me for quite some time. I don't know what it is and I'm not going to sit here and agonize over a memory watching app or something to try to figure it out myself. You know why? I switched to Chrome. I try Firefox out every once in a while to see what's up. This version, actually, is the first one that hasn't run like shit for me. I'm actually pretty happy.
Maybe it's the addons. Maybe not. I tested out a completely add-on free Firefox on one of my computers and it ran like complete dogshit. Not to mention the fact that what is the point of the browser if I can't use Addons? And before the argument that "it's shitty addons" comes up, Chrome has addons too and they aren't screwing up my browser like the Firefox ones apparently do.
It doesn't really matter who is to blame because when it comes down to it, I can do the same things I do in Firefox in Chrome now and Chrome doesn't run like shit. That's pretty much all there is to it.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
Sounds serious.
Better consult a laptoproctologist.