It doesnt. Some significant portion of that is for Firefox itself. Im estimating from my testing that Slashdot takes 30-50MB, which is normal. Why? Because it ISNT just text, has to be rendered, markup has to be applied, etc. Not being a browser dev, I cant go into too much detail, but I remember reading one dev post that indicated they might be partially storing the pages as images or bitmaps of some kind.
Regardless, this is normal for webpages today. The HTML for slashdot is quite significant, and topics tend to be very large pages with a huge amount of nested text, a huge number of embedded images, a ton of javascript manipulating things, etc.
If malware is running on your system, they already can do whatever they want, including download arbitrary code and run it. This doesnt really bring them any new capabilities.
Seems if you really wanted to control someones computer using malware, you would just do a reverse VNC connection-- doesnt require a mediation server in the middle run by Google.
How do you propose an unprivileged process give itself privileges to do so? Does it just say "please" and the OS security subsystem just goes "OK"?
Last I checked, all major OSes out there require some kind of an interactive elevation (UAC, gksudo/sudo, whatever you call the thing OSX does) in order for that to happen.
I think you might be confused about what a firewall actually does. Without reviewing the product at all I'm just gonna go ahead and say "no.
Actually, most decent remote support products these days (that is, all of them) get around that by doing outbound connections to a central "mediator" service, usually on port 80.
Firewalls are almost never an issue for remote connection software of this sort, unless they are doing DPI and specifically trying to block traffic of this sort.
This can only be a useful alternative to existing tools like TeamViewer if and only if the Chrome browser itself becomes a truly ubiquitous browser, found on EVERY machine
....Or if you support friends and family, and can standardize them on Chrome. Or if you are a network admin, and roll out Chrome MSI with GPO policies that preinstall this.
If your concern is that the remote access software might be able to be used without a valid auth code, why wouldnt that apply to solutions like TeamViewer? Or RDP? Or VNC?
Or is your concern that its "within a browser", and thus inherently must be insecure?
They can be a PITA to walk people through getting to. A lot of the requests I do, 1/3 of the time is spent getting the remote person to get to the right site and click the right thing.
This isn't going to be very useful if it requires a user to be already logged in to work.
Why not? It sounds like its directed at aiding with remote tech help requests-- think "family and friends are having issues", and this lets you log in and help them.
It actually sounds brilliant. Normally I have to direct clients, friends, family to a remote-support site, direct them to download the generated.exe, and run it to allow me in (actually, I usually end up permenantly installing said agent). Think LogMeIn Rescue, or TeamViewer (we actually use Bomgar).
If this works as advertised, it could make things a whole lot easier. Combined with the fact that Chrome can be deployed as an MSI, and extensions can be pushed and locked with GPOs, this could make support much easier.
Perhaps guaranteed food / shelter as a safety net so you don't die in a gutter,
I hate that there are homeless people, and I sympathize with their situation. At the same time, lets be realistic. At least as far as big cities are concerned, if you are dying of starvation or exposure, it isnt because there arent safety nets. Scattered throughout DC are scores of shelters, and given the abundance of incredibly cheap (though unhealthy) food everywhere in the city, it is REALLY hard to be in a situation where you simply run out of food.
We dont need our government to do this, we already have a ton of charities that do it without shoehorning the fed into an area that it has no business being. This is NOT the government's role, and it is incredibly dangerous to keep trying to find new areas for the government to have a role.
but anyone who invests hundreds of dollars in a new machine, and decides to go cheap on the memory deserves to have a shitty running machine. I don't care if it's an Apply fanboy,
Quite relevant for the apple folks, since extra RAM for them (preinstalled) is quite expensive-- can be ~10% of the price of the machine to upgrade the RAM. I think they charge $200 to upgrade to 8GB from 4.
Dell, HP, et all arent always that much better either, often they peddle upgrades like that for $100 (when RAM costs about $6 per GB right now).
Why would you flush the cache to disk? Isnt the whole point of cache specifically that it doesnt reside on the disk? Why wouldnt you just dump the cache?
Its using that much memory because of the incredible size of the page which it has to render and hold in memory as an image.
And for the record, I have it open right now in both Chrome (1 tab) and Firefox 7 (1 tab). Chrome, between its main process (~100MB) and its slashdot process (~30-50MB) weighs in @ 151MB (at the moment). Firefox, having a single process, weighs in at 140-150MB (varies over time..). When I open a second tab with the slashdot homepage, Firefox shoots to 170MB, while chrome shoots to ~160MB.
There is variance there too, so things really do not look that out of line. Check your plugins, they can be a cause-- my measurements were taken with 0 addons in firefox (chrome had addons, but they are marked separately in RAM usage).
A) You are using crappy plugins B) your profile has been in use for ages, and some corruption has crept in. Try backing your profile up, and creating a new one C) your usage has simply increased, and you havent realized it. How many tabs are we talking here? How many are gigantic scrollable blogs? D) Youre doing something else wrong.
I hate to pull in anecdotal evidence here, but Ive dealt with several hundred unique installations of firefox across several diverse platforms and scenarios, ranging from WinXP-7, CentOS, Debian, RHEL, Solaris, etc etc, and I have never seen memory usage in Firefox that was out of line with Chrome / Chromium or IE (when applicable). I myself have been using firefox since 0.9, and have only experienced the issue pre 2.0, and it is highly possible it was due to the scads of plugins I used.
Too many people view 'free' memory as a good thing
Windows Task manager does not include cache in its "physical memory" stat, which is the new "memory load". Either that, or none of the (several) boxes I use with Win7 do any caching whatsoever.
That would absolutely kill performance, and could make certain programs unusable. The current system seems to work fine. Having used firefox for several years (since the 0.9 days), I have never seen this awful RAM consumption except around 1.5 when I had about 25 addons. These days I tend to use chrome, but when I use firefox it does tend to remain open for days, with no issues.
As for the automatic "hibernating" of tabs when not in use, that already happens. Tabs that havent been used in a while are swapped out-- it happens in chrome as well, and I assume it is an OS mechanism. You can observe this with any older relatives who start new instances of firefox when they forget how to access the old instance, and leave them all running for months. When you finally try to open last month's firefox window, it will have to be fetched from paging before you can close it.
Which is true on Windows as well. Im honestly not sure where people are getting this from; I have never seen a windows box with anywhere close to 100% utilization reported that didnt cause disk thrashing. Possibly people are using RAM cleaners or something, but task manager either does not report the caching as used RAM, or the caching is nowhere near as extensive as reported.
Except in practice, if a Windows [XP | Vista | 7] box is dragging tail, and task manager shows physical utilization of RAM at 94%, you can be darn sure that the cause is RAM exhaustion and the disk is thrashing to swap stuff into paging.
The ONE example I have seen of all RAM being legitimately used-- no matter how much you have-- is Exchange 2007 / 2010. No matter how much RAM you throw in the box, it will reserve as huge a chunk of it as it can.
For the record, I have 4GB on my desktop and 8GB on my laptop, and I never see a mysterious 80% utilization that could be explained by caching. I rather suspect that if said caching is occuring (which I am told it is), it is not reflected in the task manager's stats as technically that RAM is not reserved.
Its called a subpoena, and we've had them for a very long time. If you visit a site that keeps server logs, and a court requests those logs, generally they will be turned over.
As for "everything you do online is traceable", no, not always-- SIP calls for example wouldnt be logged unless your provider records them all, which would probably fall afoul of a large number of laws.
How about this. Given the dataset that we have (the entire recorded history of human society), please give me an example that does not support my statement-- a thriving society where work is not required to live, and those who are not working are exclusively those who should not be working.
Why not use one of the thriving communist states as an example? Oh wait, there arent any, and the one "communist" country that is actually making headway is becoming more and more capitalist in order to maintain its growth-- it is at this point communist in name only.
You could of course point to Cuba, where the average (%80+) individual has about $8,000 of spending power per year, compared to our poverty line of ~$15-20k/year, and our lowest 5% at around $10k per year.... but even they are trending away from pure communism, as it simply doesnt work.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesnt. Some significant portion of that is for Firefox itself. Im estimating from my testing that Slashdot takes 30-50MB, which is normal. Why? Because it ISNT just text, has to be rendered, markup has to be applied, etc. Not being a browser dev, I cant go into too much detail, but I remember reading one dev post that indicated they might be partially storing the pages as images or bitmaps of some kind.
Regardless, this is normal for webpages today. The HTML for slashdot is quite significant, and topics tend to be very large pages with a huge amount of nested text, a huge number of embedded images, a ton of javascript manipulating things, etc.
If malware is running on your system, they already can do whatever they want, including download arbitrary code and run it. This doesnt really bring them any new capabilities.
Seems if you really wanted to control someones computer using malware, you would just do a reverse VNC connection-- doesnt require a mediation server in the middle run by Google.
How do you propose an unprivileged process give itself privileges to do so? Does it just say "please" and the OS security subsystem just goes "OK"?
Last I checked, all major OSes out there require some kind of an interactive elevation (UAC, gksudo/sudo, whatever you call the thing OSX does) in order for that to happen.
Is this a fully JS extension,
If it is, its 19MB of javascript.
I think you might be confused about what a firewall actually does. Without reviewing the product at all I'm just gonna go ahead and say "no.
Actually, most decent remote support products these days (that is, all of them) get around that by doing outbound connections to a central "mediator" service, usually on port 80.
Firewalls are almost never an issue for remote connection software of this sort, unless they are doing DPI and specifically trying to block traffic of this sort.
This can only be a useful alternative to existing tools like TeamViewer if and only if the Chrome browser itself becomes a truly ubiquitous browser, found on EVERY machine
....Or if you support friends and family, and can standardize them on Chrome. Or if you are a network admin, and roll out Chrome MSI with GPO policies that preinstall this.
If your concern is that the remote access software might be able to be used without a valid auth code, why wouldnt that apply to solutions like TeamViewer? Or RDP? Or VNC?
Or is your concern that its "within a browser", and thus inherently must be insecure?
They can be a PITA to walk people through getting to. A lot of the requests I do, 1/3 of the time is spent getting the remote person to get to the right site and click the right thing.
No, because access to the login screen requires admin (or possibly SYSTEM) rights, at least in Windows (and I would rather assume any sane OS).
This isn't going to be very useful if it requires a user to be already logged in to work.
Why not? It sounds like its directed at aiding with remote tech help requests-- think "family and friends are having issues", and this lets you log in and help them.
It actually sounds brilliant. Normally I have to direct clients, friends, family to a remote-support site, direct them to download the generated .exe, and run it to allow me in (actually, I usually end up permenantly installing said agent). Think LogMeIn Rescue, or TeamViewer (we actually use Bomgar).
If this works as advertised, it could make things a whole lot easier. Combined with the fact that Chrome can be deployed as an MSI, and extensions can be pushed and locked with GPOs, this could make support much easier.
Testing it now, but sounds great.
Perhaps guaranteed food / shelter as a safety net so you don't die in a gutter,
I hate that there are homeless people, and I sympathize with their situation. At the same time, lets be realistic. At least as far as big cities are concerned, if you are dying of starvation or exposure, it isnt because there arent safety nets. Scattered throughout DC are scores of shelters, and given the abundance of incredibly cheap (though unhealthy) food everywhere in the city, it is REALLY hard to be in a situation where you simply run out of food.
We dont need our government to do this, we already have a ton of charities that do it without shoehorning the fed into an area that it has no business being. This is NOT the government's role, and it is incredibly dangerous to keep trying to find new areas for the government to have a role.
Unchanged cache can be dumped. If you need it again, you can pull it into cache again from its original location.
but anyone who invests hundreds of dollars in a new machine, and decides to go cheap on the memory deserves to have a shitty running machine. I don't care if it's an Apply fanboy,
Quite relevant for the apple folks, since extra RAM for them (preinstalled) is quite expensive-- can be ~10% of the price of the machine to upgrade the RAM. I think they charge $200 to upgrade to 8GB from 4.
Dell, HP, et all arent always that much better either, often they peddle upgrades like that for $100 (when RAM costs about $6 per GB right now).
Why would you flush the cache to disk? Isnt the whole point of cache specifically that it doesnt reside on the disk? Why wouldnt you just dump the cache?
. Is it really doing that much more than the last version?
Some, yes.
Don't bother answering, I don't really care.
Oh, I see, that was just a rant. Carry on.
Its using that much memory because of the incredible size of the page which it has to render and hold in memory as an image.
And for the record, I have it open right now in both Chrome (1 tab) and Firefox 7 (1 tab). Chrome, between its main process (~100MB) and its slashdot process (~30-50MB) weighs in @ 151MB (at the moment). Firefox, having a single process, weighs in at 140-150MB (varies over time..). When I open a second tab with the slashdot homepage, Firefox shoots to 170MB, while chrome shoots to ~160MB.
There is variance there too, so things really do not look that out of line. Check your plugins, they can be a cause-- my measurements were taken with 0 addons in firefox (chrome had addons, but they are marked separately in RAM usage).
A) You are using crappy plugins
B) your profile has been in use for ages, and some corruption has crept in. Try backing your profile up, and creating a new one
C) your usage has simply increased, and you havent realized it. How many tabs are we talking here? How many are gigantic scrollable blogs?
D) Youre doing something else wrong.
I hate to pull in anecdotal evidence here, but Ive dealt with several hundred unique installations of firefox across several diverse platforms and scenarios, ranging from WinXP-7, CentOS, Debian, RHEL, Solaris, etc etc, and I have never seen memory usage in Firefox that was out of line with Chrome / Chromium or IE (when applicable). I myself have been using firefox since 0.9, and have only experienced the issue pre 2.0, and it is highly possible it was due to the scads of plugins I used.
Too many people view 'free' memory as a good thing
Windows Task manager does not include cache in its "physical memory" stat, which is the new "memory load". Either that, or none of the (several) boxes I use with Win7 do any caching whatsoever.
That would absolutely kill performance, and could make certain programs unusable. The current system seems to work fine. Having used firefox for several years (since the 0.9 days), I have never seen this awful RAM consumption except around 1.5 when I had about 25 addons. These days I tend to use chrome, but when I use firefox it does tend to remain open for days, with no issues.
As for the automatic "hibernating" of tabs when not in use, that already happens. Tabs that havent been used in a while are swapped out-- it happens in chrome as well, and I assume it is an OS mechanism. You can observe this with any older relatives who start new instances of firefox when they forget how to access the old instance, and leave them all running for months. When you finally try to open last month's firefox window, it will have to be fetched from paging before you can close it.
Which is true on Windows as well. Im honestly not sure where people are getting this from; I have never seen a windows box with anywhere close to 100% utilization reported that didnt cause disk thrashing. Possibly people are using RAM cleaners or something, but task manager either does not report the caching as used RAM, or the caching is nowhere near as extensive as reported.
Except in practice, if a Windows [XP | Vista | 7] box is dragging tail, and task manager shows physical utilization of RAM at 94%, you can be darn sure that the cause is RAM exhaustion and the disk is thrashing to swap stuff into paging.
The ONE example I have seen of all RAM being legitimately used-- no matter how much you have-- is Exchange 2007 / 2010. No matter how much RAM you throw in the box, it will reserve as huge a chunk of it as it can.
For the record, I have 4GB on my desktop and 8GB on my laptop, and I never see a mysterious 80% utilization that could be explained by caching. I rather suspect that if said caching is occuring (which I am told it is), it is not reflected in the task manager's stats as technically that RAM is not reserved.
Its called a subpoena, and we've had them for a very long time. If you visit a site that keeps server logs, and a court requests those logs, generally they will be turned over.
As for "everything you do online is traceable", no, not always-- SIP calls for example wouldnt be logged unless your provider records them all, which would probably fall afoul of a large number of laws.
How about this. Given the dataset that we have (the entire recorded history of human society), please give me an example that does not support my statement-- a thriving society where work is not required to live, and those who are not working are exclusively those who should not be working.
Why not use one of the thriving communist states as an example? Oh wait, there arent any, and the one "communist" country that is actually making headway is becoming more and more capitalist in order to maintain its growth-- it is at this point communist in name only.
You could of course point to Cuba, where the average (%80+) individual has about $8,000 of spending power per year, compared to our poverty line of ~$15-20k/year, and our lowest 5% at around $10k per year.... but even they are trending away from pure communism, as it simply doesnt work.
If people do not need to work to live, they will not. They will subsist on the minimum, and constantly demand that that minimum standard be improved.