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).

Comments

New Tab

[nmb3000]

Firefox 41 also removed the New Tab URL preference (browser.newtab.url), telling people to use a third-party extension instead.

The reason? Malware can change the setting. Full stop. That's it. So, because someone's computer is already compromised, and that malware changed a Firefox preference (alongside doing things like, you know, running a keylogger), Mozilla decided to cause headache and grief for everyone else. And to top it all off, if you want to continue to configure the new tab URL, you should use an extension written by some random guy.

I just don't understand the mentality. Choosing the default URL for a new tab seems like such an obvious feature, yet it's getting ripped out too, like so many others that Gavin Sharp has pissed on. Fuck Mozilla.

Re:New Tab

[Kjella]

I just don't understand the mentality.

The mentality is that you can and should build your own franken-browser from whatever plug-ins fits you, it's not supposed to be a fully functional browser you can extend but more like a skeleton you can build on. It happens when you go over the top on flexibility and think people want a DIY kit instead of a product. The problem is the same as why you can't fit any car body with any chassis with any engine with any transmission with any brakes with any interior, they don't all go together. And some parts are shit, but only by hogging memory or crashing in ways that aren't easily traceable. I don't want to be the unit and integration tester in a modern day DLL hell, because Mozilla's will not take any responsibility for plug-ins trampling over each other or bringing the browser to its knees. Don't get me wrong, the basic idea that you can write an obscure plug-in without bloating the main code base and getting approval to push it out to 100+ million users is great. But it should be more of a test bed to see what functionality should be standard for the masses, rather than pushing more and more functionality out of the core. Here's an early alpha of Firefox 100, you can have HTML engine plugins, Javascript engine plugins, UI plugins, in fact any functionality you'd care to think of. It looks like this:

main()
{
        loadPlugins()
}

Great, yes?

What?

[OverlordQ]

I thought Firefox didn't have any memory issues? That was the party line from Mozilla for so long.

Re:Other bugs

[gstoddart]

what the hell.

Monetization. Ad revenue. Analytics. Corporate branding. Vendor lock-in. Cloud services. Walled gardens. Subscriptions.

Absolutely the software world has lost its mind. The software isn't the point any more; all this other crap is.

I've lost track of how many apps I've now uninstalled because they do NOTHING you can't access with a browser. But the apps want to embed themselves so they can access your data.

Re:Other bugs

[Anna Merikin]

Aaah, I can tell you're a young one.... 'Tis the sign of another tech bubble, all of it. It's a replay of 1997-2000, but in a different mix. Now, google plays the part of Microsoft; Mozilla is alter-Netscape, trying to catch up; and Girls is Bizarro-Friends.

As Mark Twain famously said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."

Memory hog

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

After a few hours of use with, say, ~10 tabs open, Firefox 40.0.3 leaks memory until it's using 2.6G of RAM, at which point it randomly stops loading images, gets very, very laggy, and freezes for ~30 seconds at a time.

I hope this fixes that (I fail to see how it could make it any worse, frankly).