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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.
When will they fix the bug that's slowly turning Firefox into a crappy clone of Chrome?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Using Firefox has become like that relationship that used to be perfect and then out of nowhere your partner starts cheating on you and each time swears its going to be the last time.
And you keep falling for it.
"I'm a humble person really,
I'm actually much greater than I think I am"
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.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Ah. An AdBlock thread without APK is like a outhouse without the stink.
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."
On behalf of all other AC's I apologize for this piece of unintelligible tripe.
I realize we do not have a very good reputation, but this is below even our standards. And that includes goatse, GNAA and even DICE editing standards.
Again, on behalf of all AC's, our sincerest apologies.
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.
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.
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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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Get on topic. Do something useful like apk has in his program. You can't prove his points on hosts wrong either. I suppose I for one expect too much from you slashdot trolls. You don't possess the skills to do either one, so go away troll, shoo. I think it's hilarious how apk makes you fools go nuts but you never ever prove him validly technically wrong. Not ever.
That's the amazing thing about APK and his bootlicking myrmidons (like you). You just can't actually respond to what someone is saying. You read what they said, but you lack the argumentation skill to actually rebut it. Being childish, that causes you to feel like you really don't like that person. Unable to meaingfully respond and filled with your vitriol, all you can do is hand-wave, call names, and change the subject.
If (for some strange reason) I wanted to, I could do that, too. What I couldn't do is act that way, and then convince myself that I am right and the other guy is a big dummy. That is a true masterwork of functional self-deception.
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...