I seem to recall the core reason why WWII was fought was because how badly Germany was treated after WWI. Many prominent politicians predicted WWII 20 years before it happened.
Thankfully, the USA didn't repeat that mistake with Japan, a country with only a fraction the land mass of Russia, a fraction the population China, etc.
I'd like to think that, but the truth is that almost every site these days rides the latest bandwagon and is designed with flash and aesthetics first. Go to just about any design blog, and you can see designers left and right wetting their pants about the latest stupid trick that shouldn't work, but... in time, will likely become the standard.
Ads make me sick, but that's just business. People who design stark, minimalist sites that still require 4MB of scripts in the background (after applying your ad blocker) should be shot, because they're supposed to know better.
There's a reason I got out of web design as a career. I couldn't stand it anymore.
Think that's bad? I've seen a new phenomenon regarding web fonts that reminds me of the days of "Flash of Unstyled Content". The page text will load and display in a flash, but then instantly disappear until the web fonts have loaded, and then they'll be re-rendered. The result is that the text blinks in front of you briefly, as if to tease you, and then will flicker like mad for a few seconds as each different font is loaded (because headers and subscripts all need to be in different fonts).
Well, that is unless the web site hasn't fucked their UA detection, and all I ever get in PaleMoon is a totally blank page!
It is a hell of a lot easier and quicker to not program a bug in the first place, than to find and fix one.
Especially over a period of time. Bad coders release faulty code and pledge to fix it later. Good coders know this is insanity and fix it ASAP, because fixing it later is WAY more costly.
I know this may be a bit off topic, but idiotic games are just part for the course.
I wanted to buy tickets to see Steve Martin at Boston Symphony Hall a few years back, and visited the TicketMaster web site. I wasn't surprised to find I had an offer for a front-row seat, since I was very early and this wasn't exactly AC/DC or some massively popular band. However, the web site insisted I needed to buy the tickets within 10 minutes, or I'd most likely lose my seats to another buyer. I messed around for a bit to see what the rates were for other seats, and sure enough, once the 10 minute timer was up, the front-row seats were no longer available and I was offered a new selection a few rows back. Rinse and repeat a few times, and I soon found myself in the middle of the venue, with all the front row seats having sold out, and the site urging me to buy RIGHT NOW before I risk losing out and every seat has been sold. No matter what I did, the web site wouldn't give me a decent seat again.
I knew very well the seats weren't selling out, so I simply cleared my web browser cookies, and... found myself in the front row again.
Another lovely bonus is how they offered to mail me the tickets for free, but they would charge (if I remember correctly) a $17 convenience fee for electronic tickets I could print myself. They employ e-book logic, apparently.
This type of bologna is why I stopped going to major concerts entirely. Also, it was surprisingly fun to visit a local race track (Seekonk Speedway in MA) for a mere $20, rather than one of the regional NASCAR races. Small shows may not have as much spectacle, but they're still lots of fun and you don't have to put up with all this ticket gouging nonsense
You mean the days when simply plugging in some fast RAM caused half your software to stop working? 8)
Both my A1000 and A1200 were the most fun computers I ever owned, but man, Amiga programmers were the worst. They understood nothing about making software for a proper OS, especially when copy protection was involved (as it always was).
Are you sure it's not a case of geeks being scared of a company that resorts to tactics like booth babes?
I find it interesting that while many people here are discussing the shallow nature of "babes" who may not have any knowledge of the company product, you're upholding the stereotype that geeks are too timid and antisocial to talk to women.
No it can't, selective breeding and direct genetic modification end up with the exact same result, and are both "genetic modifications" by any reasonable definition of the term.
Other than the instant gratification for huge profits. Selective breeding takes time and there's more opportunity to test it. Genetic modifications are booted out the door as soon as they can make money.
First requirement of a connector is it should reliably stay connected even with little pulls on the cable
Lol... you should check out the proprietary power cable they used for the original PPC Mac Mini. It literally had zero friction and no retention mechanism whatsoever, so to keep my Mini from shutting off while just sitting on my desk, I had to duct tape the cable in place. Even better is the fact that it only had to slip out about 2mm before the connection was lost, so even taped in place sometimes the power still cut out. Worst fucking design in the world... hands down! I would have returned the thing if I hadn't only been using it occasionally for compatibility testing.
That's why you learn how to model information and don't worry about the language. No matter what, you'll have to learn other languages later in your career, anyway.
First of all, some people are only interested in doing something as a hobby, and I can't stand it when people tell me that unless I'm intending to do some hardcore enterprise-ready programming, I should STFU and go home. It really sickens me how almost every programming community (and many development environments) are heavily biased towards doing real programming for work. Some people just want to learn the ropes and have some fun.
Second, Google is terrible at giving you good information, because Google doesn't do shit but point you to forums full of "experts" who do nothing but whine about the noobs. Plus, that information is always years out of date.
Third, even seasoned programmers tend to forget the difference between coding and programming. I knew how to code on my Amiga, writing simple algorithms and such, but I knew nothing about programming until I got into web development more than 10 years later. You know, modeling data, patterns, build environments, and so forth. Don't assume the guy is too lazy to look for information. Maybe he needs a lead as to what to look for.
Recommend some good books or a few, simple, well-structured applications to study. Telling people to "do it yourself" is just laziness on the part of bitter experts.
Hardly surprising. I just found out that if I access YouTube with Firefox, instead of Chrome, some key features are missing, such as highlighted comments. You know, features driven by plain HTML that don't need or utilize special functionality exclusive to Chrome.
I guess Google isn't content discriminating against the competition, and now they're doing so against their own software, too.
Tossing that would allow those resources to more efficiently run the other applications, save battery, use less of the small and finite flash storage, and so on
Not to mention other revolutionary modernizations, such as 6GB of new graphics, cutting-edge UX nonsense, and a thinner case with a smaller battery.
I'd rather have the compatibility, thank you. I'm sick of living in a world where things more than a few years are forced to die because reasons.
The galaxy isn't much different than our solar system or a satellite rotating around the Earth. It emits radiation, it absorbs radiation from other galaxies, and has its own friction. Some numbers may be small, but not zero.
Bull. That just means customization hasn't been implemented properly, so that you can easily switch customization profiles (including the default). A good UI allows you to temporarily revert to default behavior, especially when dealing with a platform, like an OS or a browser.
I hate applications that only allow one profile slot, where any change is instantaneous and irreversible, and don't let you save multiple profiles. Which is to say, most of them.
Hardly surprising. Everybody knows Microsoft is staggering updates, so not everyone gets the latest at once. The classic way to treat customers as guinea pigs, completely at random. It's also a great way to argue that "only a small number of people" are having problems with a new update, as MS does with every update that goes wrong.
What bothers me the most is that the OS seems to adjust its configuration and behavior based on how you use the system. I've already seen behavior that if you defer updates too many times, the OS will disable the defer feature by greying it out in the control panel. How is a company supposed to reliably test features like this if behavior is actually designed to be inconsistent?
Not to focus too much on the negative, but I get a kick out of all his hyperlinks to educational videos that require the Safari browser or a proprietary iOS app to view. In general, I can't get over how much Swift as a language, along with its ongoing development, has the whole Apple philosophy and ecosystem in mind.
I'd also take issue with the idea that Swift (and indeed most languages these days) can fill the void left behind by the death of BASICs. Swift has no GUI layers built-in, and as Lattner pointed out, there don't appear to be any simple GUI projects in development. Having a gaming sandbox is fine for instant gratification, but if you want to learn how to avoid using globals everywhere and make a proper, straightforward GUI application with buttons, drop menus, sliders, and so forth, there still isn't anything out there that makes it simple without needing a separate, huge runtime to be installed.
Ask for any leads on how to make simple GUI apps, and most people will point you to C++ or Python. The former is about the most complex language available, and the latter has no built-in facility for making statically-linked, redistributable executables (among other issues). Web browsers can't access the filesystem, so unless you're smitten with the whole cloud fad, there's not much potential there, either. It's unfortunate that things like Unity and Lumberyard are taking up the role that BASIC had. I don't want to make games, I want to make simple GUI-driven applications.
I especially like it when those new features have incredibly generic names, implying how simple and fundamental they are regardless of usage, and not to mention how difficult it will be to search for information about them on the web.
Money does him no real good, because there's nowhere to spend it. He's in a prison as it is, though perhaps a more commodious one than awaits him once the Brits get their hands on him.
Like how drug lords continue to run their empires from within prison?
Some people crave ego and power more than money. The alternative to being in the embassy is to go to an actual prison... without Internet access.
Seriously, I've literally been chasing this for years to no avail. If it is just some sort of super-aggressive caching policy, then I'd refer you to the comment by AC below, who hit the nail on the head: "Sufficiently aggressive caching policy is indistinguishable from memory leak."
Well, that depends what tool you use to gauge memory usage. I use both the "about:memory" page and the app working set size in Process Explorer. The two don't often agree with each other. In particular, even though about:memory shows that most memory has been released, the working set still hovers over 1GB. Sometimes you have to sit and wait a while before the memory pooler (or whatever) gives memory back to the OS. However, through various tricks, I can indeed get both to reduce to levels similar to a clean startup. It's well known that Firefox will cache many, many pages in memory "just in case" you hit the Back button, and will even do so after closing a tab/window. Yes, it may be dumb design, but I'm not convinced it's due to leaks.
Slow and jerky scrolling, delayed mouse click events, etc etc.
I've seen this on XP 32-bit when memory usage goes beyond ~1.8GB, including parts of the display not drawing correctly, and even rainbow graphics corruption. I presume its because internally the browser is nearing the application memory limit on a 32-bit OS. On 64-bit, the same version of the browser does not have these problems. The biggest problems I've noticed on 64-bit are the pauses (cycle collections, of course), and sometimes the text caret disappears. Otherwise the browser is perfectly stable and never, ever crashes.
Honestly, if Mozilla doesn't fix this in the next rev or two I'll be switching to Palemoon or Opera or something
I've been using PaleMoon as my primary browser for about 2 years and it's been great... until version 27. Version 26 had absolutely none of the memory hogging or leaking problems of Firefox, and would run perfectly around 300MB or less for days. It was fantastic. Then version 27 was retrograded to a newer version of Firefox, and now it's just as bad, gobbling up a gig of memory and never letting go without using the "tricks". The fact that PaleMoon 26 worked exactly as it should and 27 "leaks" memory is part of the reason I believe it's a configuration issue. Most of my work has been comparing PM 26 an 27 to track down the problem. Alas, there's 40K additional files in version 27 and most of the settings for memory management are now "-1" (for fully automatic) instead of hard values like in version 26. It's proven very difficult figuring out how the code actually works. I wish I were a more experience application developer, and not just a web designer.
A word of warning: many web frameworks test Firefox by brand name, and not whether your browser is Mozilla compatible. As a result, a LOT of pages will show up blank or missing huge chunks of content when viewed in PaleMoon, regardless of how you configure the user agent mode. Alas, life with PaleMoon is very frustrating, as there are way too many web pages that refuse to adhere to standards and will not work properly. It's the same situation with all "unpopular" browsers. Apparently, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge are the only browsers worth supporting these days, and standards-compliance just isn't fashionable anymore.
Having done a lot of source comparisons between Firefox and PaleMoon (and especially PaleMoon v26 and v27), it appears that these are not memory leaks, but bad caching policy. Firefox seems to want to cache things indefinitely even if the resources are not needed anymore, but it does not actually "leak" them. I'm still trying to track down how Firefox's automatic management settings work, because this stuff is not controlled with user settings (anything that can be set in user.js).
For a long time I've insisted that if you close all windows and point the last window to about:blank, the browser will still hang on to over a gig of memory. If you do cycle collects and minimize memory usage, the browser still won't release memory. However, if you do a lot of bizarre stuff to flush out the browser history, like open dozens of blank pages and do lots of Backs and Forwards, eventually the browser can be coaxed into clearing caches and you can then cycle collect to get memory usage below 300MB again. The memory does release correctly when it has to. The browser is just designed to use a max, fixed amount of memory, as a percentage of how much RAM you have in your computer. My last tests were with Firefox 47, and on my 16GB Win7 x64 system, that fixed amount appears to be exactly 1.6GB. Firefox 50 uses less memory than 47, but I haven't tested what the max limit is, yet.
The browser is simply trying too hard to be fast by caching the hell out of everything it doesn't need to -- mostly in the Javascript runtime and heap. I have no doubts this can be easily fixed by tweaking some settings, and not rewriting code. Mozilla just absolutely refuses to do this.
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I seem to recall the core reason why WWII was fought was because how badly Germany was treated after WWI. Many prominent politicians predicted WWII 20 years before it happened.
Thankfully, the USA didn't repeat that mistake with Japan, a country with only a fraction the land mass of Russia, a fraction the population China, etc.
I'd like to think that, but the truth is that almost every site these days rides the latest bandwagon and is designed with flash and aesthetics first. Go to just about any design blog, and you can see designers left and right wetting their pants about the latest stupid trick that shouldn't work, but... in time, will likely become the standard.
Ads make me sick, but that's just business. People who design stark, minimalist sites that still require 4MB of scripts in the background (after applying your ad blocker) should be shot, because they're supposed to know better.
There's a reason I got out of web design as a career. I couldn't stand it anymore.
Think that's bad? I've seen a new phenomenon regarding web fonts that reminds me of the days of "Flash of Unstyled Content". The page text will load and display in a flash, but then instantly disappear until the web fonts have loaded, and then they'll be re-rendered. The result is that the text blinks in front of you briefly, as if to tease you, and then will flicker like mad for a few seconds as each different font is loaded (because headers and subscripts all need to be in different fonts).
Well, that is unless the web site hasn't fucked their UA detection, and all I ever get in PaleMoon is a totally blank page!
That's the IT equivalent to, "hold my beer and watch this..."
It is a hell of a lot easier and quicker to not program a bug in the first place, than to find and fix one.
Especially over a period of time. Bad coders release faulty code and pledge to fix it later. Good coders know this is insanity and fix it ASAP, because fixing it later is WAY more costly.
I know this may be a bit off topic, but idiotic games are just part for the course.
I wanted to buy tickets to see Steve Martin at Boston Symphony Hall a few years back, and visited the TicketMaster web site. I wasn't surprised to find I had an offer for a front-row seat, since I was very early and this wasn't exactly AC/DC or some massively popular band. However, the web site insisted I needed to buy the tickets within 10 minutes, or I'd most likely lose my seats to another buyer. I messed around for a bit to see what the rates were for other seats, and sure enough, once the 10 minute timer was up, the front-row seats were no longer available and I was offered a new selection a few rows back. Rinse and repeat a few times, and I soon found myself in the middle of the venue, with all the front row seats having sold out, and the site urging me to buy RIGHT NOW before I risk losing out and every seat has been sold. No matter what I did, the web site wouldn't give me a decent seat again.
I knew very well the seats weren't selling out, so I simply cleared my web browser cookies, and... found myself in the front row again.
Another lovely bonus is how they offered to mail me the tickets for free, but they would charge (if I remember correctly) a $17 convenience fee for electronic tickets I could print myself. They employ e-book logic, apparently.
This type of bologna is why I stopped going to major concerts entirely. Also, it was surprisingly fun to visit a local race track (Seekonk Speedway in MA) for a mere $20, rather than one of the regional NASCAR races. Small shows may not have as much spectacle, but they're still lots of fun and you don't have to put up with all this ticket gouging nonsense
That's not how it was back in the Amiga days.
You mean the days when simply plugging in some fast RAM caused half your software to stop working? 8)
Both my A1000 and A1200 were the most fun computers I ever owned, but man, Amiga programmers were the worst. They understood nothing about making software for a proper OS, especially when copy protection was involved (as it always was).
Are you sure it's not a case of geeks being scared of a company that resorts to tactics like booth babes?
I find it interesting that while many people here are discussing the shallow nature of "babes" who may not have any knowledge of the company product, you're upholding the stereotype that geeks are too timid and antisocial to talk to women.
No it can't, selective breeding and direct genetic modification end up with the exact same result, and are both "genetic modifications" by any reasonable definition of the term.
Other than the instant gratification for huge profits. Selective breeding takes time and there's more opportunity to test it. Genetic modifications are booted out the door as soon as they can make money.
First requirement of a connector is it should reliably stay connected even with little pulls on the cable
Lol... you should check out the proprietary power cable they used for the original PPC Mac Mini. It literally had zero friction and no retention mechanism whatsoever, so to keep my Mini from shutting off while just sitting on my desk, I had to duct tape the cable in place. Even better is the fact that it only had to slip out about 2mm before the connection was lost, so even taped in place sometimes the power still cut out. Worst fucking design in the world... hands down! I would have returned the thing if I hadn't only been using it occasionally for compatibility testing.
That's why you learn how to model information and don't worry about the language. No matter what, you'll have to learn other languages later in your career, anyway.
This is a terrible answer.
First of all, some people are only interested in doing something as a hobby, and I can't stand it when people tell me that unless I'm intending to do some hardcore enterprise-ready programming, I should STFU and go home. It really sickens me how almost every programming community (and many development environments) are heavily biased towards doing real programming for work. Some people just want to learn the ropes and have some fun.
Second, Google is terrible at giving you good information, because Google doesn't do shit but point you to forums full of "experts" who do nothing but whine about the noobs. Plus, that information is always years out of date.
Third, even seasoned programmers tend to forget the difference between coding and programming. I knew how to code on my Amiga, writing simple algorithms and such, but I knew nothing about programming until I got into web development more than 10 years later. You know, modeling data, patterns, build environments, and so forth. Don't assume the guy is too lazy to look for information. Maybe he needs a lead as to what to look for.
Recommend some good books or a few, simple, well-structured applications to study. Telling people to "do it yourself" is just laziness on the part of bitter experts.
Hardly surprising. I just found out that if I access YouTube with Firefox, instead of Chrome, some key features are missing, such as highlighted comments. You know, features driven by plain HTML that don't need or utilize special functionality exclusive to Chrome.
I guess Google isn't content discriminating against the competition, and now they're doing so against their own software, too.
Tossing that would allow those resources to more efficiently run the other applications, save battery, use less of the small and finite flash storage, and so on
Not to mention other revolutionary modernizations, such as 6GB of new graphics, cutting-edge UX nonsense, and a thinner case with a smaller battery.
I'd rather have the compatibility, thank you. I'm sick of living in a world where things more than a few years are forced to die because reasons.
The galaxy isn't much different than our solar system or a satellite rotating around the Earth. It emits radiation, it absorbs radiation from other galaxies, and has its own friction. Some numbers may be small, but not zero.
Bull. That just means customization hasn't been implemented properly, so that you can easily switch customization profiles (including the default). A good UI allows you to temporarily revert to default behavior, especially when dealing with a platform, like an OS or a browser.
I hate applications that only allow one profile slot, where any change is instantaneous and irreversible, and don't let you save multiple profiles. Which is to say, most of them.
Come on... we have more important things to discuss, like how big the inaugural attendance was.
Hardly surprising. Everybody knows Microsoft is staggering updates, so not everyone gets the latest at once. The classic way to treat customers as guinea pigs, completely at random. It's also a great way to argue that "only a small number of people" are having problems with a new update, as MS does with every update that goes wrong.
What bothers me the most is that the OS seems to adjust its configuration and behavior based on how you use the system. I've already seen behavior that if you defer updates too many times, the OS will disable the defer feature by greying it out in the control panel. How is a company supposed to reliably test features like this if behavior is actually designed to be inconsistent?
Not to focus too much on the negative, but I get a kick out of all his hyperlinks to educational videos that require the Safari browser or a proprietary iOS app to view. In general, I can't get over how much Swift as a language, along with its ongoing development, has the whole Apple philosophy and ecosystem in mind.
I'd also take issue with the idea that Swift (and indeed most languages these days) can fill the void left behind by the death of BASICs. Swift has no GUI layers built-in, and as Lattner pointed out, there don't appear to be any simple GUI projects in development. Having a gaming sandbox is fine for instant gratification, but if you want to learn how to avoid using globals everywhere and make a proper, straightforward GUI application with buttons, drop menus, sliders, and so forth, there still isn't anything out there that makes it simple without needing a separate, huge runtime to be installed.
Ask for any leads on how to make simple GUI apps, and most people will point you to C++ or Python. The former is about the most complex language available, and the latter has no built-in facility for making statically-linked, redistributable executables (among other issues). Web browsers can't access the filesystem, so unless you're smitten with the whole cloud fad, there's not much potential there, either. It's unfortunate that things like Unity and Lumberyard are taking up the role that BASIC had. I don't want to make games, I want to make simple GUI-driven applications.
I especially like it when those new features have incredibly generic names, implying how simple and fundamental they are regardless of usage, and not to mention how difficult it will be to search for information about them on the web.
If there's one thing I've learned in my life, it's that experts are often terrible teachers.
It's no wonder the general public is always so intimidated and suspicious of smart people.
Money does him no real good, because there's nowhere to spend it. He's in a prison as it is, though perhaps a more commodious one than awaits him once the Brits get their hands on him.
Like how drug lords continue to run their empires from within prison?
Some people crave ego and power more than money. The alternative to being in the embassy is to go to an actual prison... without Internet access.
Seriously, I've literally been chasing this for years to no avail. If it is just some sort of super-aggressive caching policy, then I'd refer you to the comment by AC below, who hit the nail on the head: "Sufficiently aggressive caching policy is indistinguishable from memory leak."
Well, that depends what tool you use to gauge memory usage. I use both the "about:memory" page and the app working set size in Process Explorer. The two don't often agree with each other. In particular, even though about:memory shows that most memory has been released, the working set still hovers over 1GB. Sometimes you have to sit and wait a while before the memory pooler (or whatever) gives memory back to the OS. However, through various tricks, I can indeed get both to reduce to levels similar to a clean startup. It's well known that Firefox will cache many, many pages in memory "just in case" you hit the Back button, and will even do so after closing a tab/window. Yes, it may be dumb design, but I'm not convinced it's due to leaks.
Slow and jerky scrolling, delayed mouse click events, etc etc.
I've seen this on XP 32-bit when memory usage goes beyond ~1.8GB, including parts of the display not drawing correctly, and even rainbow graphics corruption. I presume its because internally the browser is nearing the application memory limit on a 32-bit OS. On 64-bit, the same version of the browser does not have these problems. The biggest problems I've noticed on 64-bit are the pauses (cycle collections, of course), and sometimes the text caret disappears. Otherwise the browser is perfectly stable and never, ever crashes.
Honestly, if Mozilla doesn't fix this in the next rev or two I'll be switching to Palemoon or Opera or something
I've been using PaleMoon as my primary browser for about 2 years and it's been great... until version 27. Version 26 had absolutely none of the memory hogging or leaking problems of Firefox, and would run perfectly around 300MB or less for days. It was fantastic. Then version 27 was retrograded to a newer version of Firefox, and now it's just as bad, gobbling up a gig of memory and never letting go without using the "tricks". The fact that PaleMoon 26 worked exactly as it should and 27 "leaks" memory is part of the reason I believe it's a configuration issue. Most of my work has been comparing PM 26 an 27 to track down the problem. Alas, there's 40K additional files in version 27 and most of the settings for memory management are now "-1" (for fully automatic) instead of hard values like in version 26. It's proven very difficult figuring out how the code actually works. I wish I were a more experience application developer, and not just a web designer.
A word of warning: many web frameworks test Firefox by brand name, and not whether your browser is Mozilla compatible. As a result, a LOT of pages will show up blank or missing huge chunks of content when viewed in PaleMoon, regardless of how you configure the user agent mode. Alas, life with PaleMoon is very frustrating, as there are way too many web pages that refuse to adhere to standards and will not work properly. It's the same situation with all "unpopular" browsers. Apparently, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge are the only browsers worth supporting these days, and standards-compliance just isn't fashionable anymore.
I guess everything can qualify as an experience these days.
"Excuse me, but I'm non-binary. Don't refer to me as he, but as they."
Congratulations, you just partook in the identity experience!
Having done a lot of source comparisons between Firefox and PaleMoon (and especially PaleMoon v26 and v27), it appears that these are not memory leaks, but bad caching policy. Firefox seems to want to cache things indefinitely even if the resources are not needed anymore, but it does not actually "leak" them. I'm still trying to track down how Firefox's automatic management settings work, because this stuff is not controlled with user settings (anything that can be set in user.js).
For a long time I've insisted that if you close all windows and point the last window to about:blank, the browser will still hang on to over a gig of memory. If you do cycle collects and minimize memory usage, the browser still won't release memory. However, if you do a lot of bizarre stuff to flush out the browser history, like open dozens of blank pages and do lots of Backs and Forwards, eventually the browser can be coaxed into clearing caches and you can then cycle collect to get memory usage below 300MB again. The memory does release correctly when it has to. The browser is just designed to use a max, fixed amount of memory, as a percentage of how much RAM you have in your computer. My last tests were with Firefox 47, and on my 16GB Win7 x64 system, that fixed amount appears to be exactly 1.6GB. Firefox 50 uses less memory than 47, but I haven't tested what the max limit is, yet.
The browser is simply trying too hard to be fast by caching the hell out of everything it doesn't need to -- mostly in the Javascript runtime and heap. I have no doubts this can be easily fixed by tweaking some settings, and not rewriting code. Mozilla just absolutely refuses to do this.