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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
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!
They've got to save memory somehow, you know!
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
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."
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.
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?
I have to give them credit. The Firefox devs have quite a sense of humor.
I remember when they claimed that Firefox's excessive memory usage was a feature not a bug -- i.e., Firefox was caching pages. Which is really great except that it wasn't true.
Oh please no! High-res 3D "punch the monkey ads" :(
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.
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.)
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?
I just RTFA so I'll answer that for you: "weren't their fault". In TFA they say the memory leaks aren't Mozilla's fault, but it is their problem. The plugins create the memory leaks and there's not much Mozilla can do about that. They've tried working with lots of plugin writers to clean it up and they've got them to make progress, but they can't force every developer to cooperate, and they can't force those that do cooperate to fix it 100%. So instead, they've figured out a way to forcefull rip the memory out of the hands of the plugins so they can free it up. Theoretically this could be problematic (if the plugin later wanted to use that now-gone memory), but apparently they've done it in a way that ends up not causing any problems (though we'll see what happens once everyone is using it).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Oh hey, look, it works for everyone else, guess we can ignore you then!
Sounds like it has a case of memoroids!
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!
The Firefox dom inspector is a bit shit. I doubt it's a live view unlike Firebug. In fact they shouldn't have bothered and spoke to the firebug guys about integrating it into Firefox.
My local development database CentOs VM with a stripped down dataset is larger than your plenty of memory.
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.
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.
Some people have a laptop asshole and some have one on the bottom.
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 have to give them credit. The Firefox devs have quite a sense of humor.
I remember when they claimed that Firefox's excessive memory usage was a feature not a bug -- i.e., Firefox was caching pages. Which is really great except that it wasn't true.
I remember that. It actually was all true, and not as you describe. They never said that the memory usage was "a feature, not a bug". That would be daft. They said that the enormous memory usage of one particular version wasn't caused by a memory leak as many suspected (there were several known ones at that stage, but this wasn't one of them), but rather that it was caused by a new feature that was added to that version and removed from the next (hey, let's use all the free memory as a cache pool! when apps need more memory we'll feed it to them as needed. what could go wrong?). It was a misfeature - a bad idea that worked as it was designed to.
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
Agreed, firebug has been so useful for so very long, it'd be better to just ensure that it keeps working, why bloat the browser for those very few that would need firebug? for that matter, most of the devs in question on Mozilla probably use firebug, so didn't see/notice the shortcomings of the new tool(s).
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
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. So what is the support path? How does this get fixed?
First of all, if you're running on the Beta Channel, you shouldn't be asking how to submit bugs or complaining about them. But if you must, just google "firefox memshrink and bug report". There's a ton of information. I filled one out a few weeks ago for an HTML5 game. They were responsive and addressed the issue quickly.
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.
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.
That's a common misconception. Fortunately I wrote https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/08/29/debunking-a-misconception-about-firefox-releases/ earlier today just for you.
"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.
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.