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Firefox To Let Users Control Memory Usage (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Mozilla engineers are working on a new section in the browser's preferences that will let users control the browser's performance. Work on this new section started last Friday when an issue was opened in the Firefox bug tracker. Right now, the Firefox UI team has proposed a basic sketch of the settings section and its controls. Firefox developers are now working to isolate or implement the code needed to control those settings [1, 2, 3]. According to the current version of the planned Performance settings section UI, users will be able to control if they use UI animations (to be added in a future Firefox version), if they use page prefetching (feature to preload links listed on a page), and how many "content" processes Firefox uses (Firefox currently supports two processes [one for the Firefox core and one for content], but this will expand to more starting v54).
I also don't like the UI, who needs sliders and whatnot when all they need to add are the following config toggles:
[X] Use 100% of CPU performing almost any operation.
[X] Consume GB of memory with more than a handful of web pages open.
[X] Leak memory.
[X] Burn up CPU and run down the laptop battery while doing absolutely nothing.
Then you could just uncheck all those enabled-by-default options and get decent performance from your browser.
The whole article seems to be pretty sycophantic, for example:
the browser was unfairly labeled as a memory hog
"unfairly"? I guess Hitler was also unfairly labelled as being a bit antisemitic, but he wasn't really such a bad guy when you got to know him. Firefox is the single biggest memory hog on my machine, it's currently using more memory than all other apps and the OS combined, and that's SOP, not some one-off that's just popped up today.