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Mozilla Fixed a 14-Year-Old Bug In Firefox, Now Adblock Plus Uses Less Memory
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla launched Firefox 41 yesterday. Today, Adblock Plus confirmed the update "massively improves" the memory usage of its Firefox add-on. This particular memory issue was brought up in May 2014 by Mozilla and by Adblock Plus. But one of the bugs that contributed to the problem was actually first reported on Bugzilla in April 2001 (bug 77999).
When you can use ublock Origin, which uses even less ram.
AFAICT it's not a bug, more of a feature request.
The problem was that style sheets were not being shared between pages, even if they were identical. So AdBlockPro had a copy of its style sheets shared in each tab. Apparently it uses a large style sheet?
So this change allowed for some de-duplication.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm not sure what to think. When I first reported a memory leak way back on v3.x, I was told I was a liar and that Firefox had no memory leak. As more and more people experienced it, Mozilla (without admitting they were wrong) "fixed" the memory leak. Then they "fixed" it again. And again.
I'm tempted to try Firefox, or at least the nightly, after many years away from it due to the AdBlock finding.
I would buy into that argument more if Firefox actually released all the memory from tabs when you were done doing using them.
Coincidentally i just happen to have 100 tabs open, spread across 9 windows, and Firefox is currently consuming 2,871,288 K of private memory.
Close one window with 8 (graphically dense tabs). Wait 30 seconds. Now down to 2,802,295 K.
Close a window with 15 tabs of webcomics. Wait 30 seconds. Now down to 2,717,452 K
I won't bore with you with the rest of the details. Continue closing windows, then tabs, until this post is the only tab left. Still using 1,979,024 K!
The other 99 tabs were apparently just a little it's over 9000 K each, but this last tab is holding on to almost 2 GB of memory with a death grip
The incentive to close extraneous tabs and windows is pretty minuscule when it doesn't actually gain me that much. So instead i open as many tabs as i feel like, then just close everything and start over when either Firefox or the PC starts getting sluggish.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
We are relatively lean and mean compared to other browsers, but that doesn't mean "no memory issues", of course. So enough with the straw men.
FF used to be lean and mean, but honestly, there is no way I can say that with a straight face now. I still like FF, but with all the crap packed into it by default, "lean and mean" just doesn't apply.
Is it still the best browser out there? Maybe, but I feel it's gone downhill in the last 10 ~20 releases. There's no denying it, and this bullshit memory issue has been plaguing for a long, long time.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...