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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.
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
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.
Indeed. Automatic updates are already a very bad idea. Making them silent is the hight of stupidity.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Install Opera instead. There is a very small number of sites with problems, most work just fine.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Automatic updates are dangerous for high reliability systems, mission critical applications, or anything that is supposed to run unattended.
....Which is why in those situations you set the preference to disable auto-updates, and push that out via GPO.
Seriously guys this isnt rocket science.