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Mozilla Fixed a 14-Year-Old Bug In Firefox, Now Adblock Plus Uses Less Memory

Posted by timothy on from the better-browsing dept.

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).

9 of 410 comments (clear)

  1. Other bugs by penguinoid · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When will they fix the bug that's slowly turning Firefox into a crappy clone of Chrome?

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    Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
    1. Re:Other bugs by lister+king+of+smeg · · Score: 5, Interesting

      When will they fix the bug that's slowly turning Firefox into a crappy clone of Chrome?

      I think that particular cancer has it has gone malignant and spread to far already. I think I am going to jump ship to sea-monkey if this keeps up, I mean, I already use Firefox and Thunderbird, and they have crammed webIDE into Firefox anyway so I may as well have it all in one piece. I will probably wait for my biannual OS version bump, But that may change to now too, as Ubuntu has jumped aboard the systemD titanic on the next LTS version.

      Is is just me or has the whole software world lost its mind.

      Windows is trying to go full panopticon and you pay a subscription for it.
      Linux distros are going batshit crazy and slapping a tablet UI on desktops and putting immature, kitchen sink crap-ware as their init
      android is trying to kill external storage as unlimited dataplans are killed off.
      Mobile has killed the idea of fallowing open standards and you need separate apps for every network so you can talk to everyone Skype, face book messenger, google hangouts/voice/chat/mail/talk, snap-chat, whatsapp, ... when previously I could just use pidgin and talk to everyone.
      Cloud storage everything, when storage has never been cheaper.
      And Mozilla's insanity from lets clone chrome to making Firefox a catch all when it was meant to be just the browser, and wasting resources on building their own os.

      what the hell.

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      ---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
    2. Re:Other bugs by edxwelch · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That's why I use Pale Moon - which is basically the Firefox UI as it was 5 years ago, but with all the latest core updates.

    3. Re:Other bugs by Lennie · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Why would you single out software ?

      The whole world has lost their mind (with the US being one of the countries at the front).

      Let's take the economy as an example.

      You think this interest rate is normal ?:
      http://www.tradingeconomics.co...

      You think quantitative easing is the new normal ?

      Even if you agree that these are necessary measures you'd have to agree they should only be temporarily.

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      New things are always on the horizon
  2. Re:New Tab by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They also refuse to honor JPG rotation, because it might break the internet, without bothering to check and see if properly following the standard would make things better or worse.

  3. Re:Ublock = inferior & inefficient vs. hosts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Here comes Slashdot's resident spammer to tell us why browser extensions are bad, but some bullshit software he wrote (which just rides the coattails of other people) is good.

    Notice he never addresses how advertising companies spin up new servers day in and day out, but no operating system's implementation of /etc/hosts will support wildcards on a domain. Blocking foo.adserver.com is useless when they create bar.adserver.com and baz.adserver.com an hour from now. Instead, he will ad-hominem attack anyone mentioning this.

    Notice he never addresses the fact that advertising companies have begun serving their ads directly from IP addresses, bypassing DNS altogether. Instead, he will ad-hominem attack anyone mentioning this.

    Notice he never addresses the fact that browser extensions can recognize and block certain DOM elements no matter where they come from, whereas a hosts file is completely incapable of assisting in this manner. Instead, he will ad-hominem attack anyone mentioning this.

  4. 14 year old bug huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, way to go Firefox! Right on top of things! But I thought Firefox has been saying for years it has no memory issues? So is this a 14 year old issue that really isn't an issue that now has been fixed? Got it.

  5. Re:I have seen that happen. by Daetrin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    And then close Firefox, open it again, with this post as the only tab. 349,349 K. Opening up a second tab takes it to 357,096 K.

    So when you start Firefox has a base footprint of about 340 K + 8K per tab. (Depending on the contents of the page of course.) If it could actually _stay_ like that and recover memory properly when i close tabs then i wouldn't complain. Instead however there was about 1.6 GB of crap stuck in memory before i closed the program completely.

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  6. Great! So now they can continue fixing ... by ArsenneLupin · · Score: 3, Interesting
    ... all the other 14-20 year old bugs.

    Any idea why it took them so long?