And for most users, for whom Firefox uses no more memory than other browsers, continuing to post that Firefox has a serious memory issue makes _no_ difference. The only post that will make any difference is one that describes this memory issue in enough detail so that someone can write up a bug report. Until someone does that, it's pointless whining.
This will change somewhat with SeaMonkey 2, due out around the same time as Firefox 3. It dumps the old XPFE front-end in favor of Firefox's new toolkit front-end. This will reduce the amount of non-shared code, and make it easier to port non-shared code from Firefox and Thunderbird to SeaMonkey.
I haven't done a memory profile, but I do have smth for you to try out. Go to this site and leave FF running overnight.
I left that site open overnight in Firefox 2.0.0.3. When I opened the page, Firefox had 31 MB Mem Usage and 40 MB VM Size. This morning, Firefox had 31 MB Mem Usage and 40 MB VM Size. Perhaps you should find a more convincing demonstration of Firefox's horrible and obvious memory issues.
I left Firefox 2.0.0.3 open all night with the Google homepage and my Gmail inbox open in two tabs. When I first started, Firefox had 40 MB Mem Usage and 31 MB VM Size. This morning, Firefox had 40 MB Mem Usage and 31 MB VM Size. Maybe there's something critical you're leaving out of your steps to reproduce the problem. Or maybe something's just screwed up on your computer causing the excessive memory use. Try creating a new profile.
Ah, memory leaks when gmail is open. Now maybe we can discuss an actual, confirmed memory leak for a change. Of the six reported leaks with gmail, four are fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.3 and two seem to be Firefox 3 only. If you can still reproduce a memory leak with gmail up in Firefox 2.0.0.3, you should file a bug report to make sure the problem gets addressed. A browser using 1 GB of memory after a day of use certainly isn't reasonable. It sounds like a problem that should be fixed ASAP. Filing the bug report, including a set of steps to reproduce the problem, is the first step to getting it fixed.
Its a worthless comparrison and anyone with profiling experience can tell you how easy it is to produce skewed micro benchmarks.
Then it should be even easier to produce a benchmark showing a "memory issue" with Firefox. Why not create one and we can all see what this thing is once and for all? If no one else is willing to write a benchmark, then we'll just have to settle for the one that exists, won't we?
I don't install Flash in Firefox, but I routinely reach 200MB use by the end of the day with an average of about four tabs open; I've only had it running today for about 2.5 hours and it's at 135MB.
Is that any worse than other browsers? Here are some instructions for seeing Opera and IE use 150 MB or more within about three hours with one tab open. Firefox 2 consumes less than 100 MB viewing exactly the same sites as those other browsers. If you want to say the memory of a browser is enormous, oughtn't you compare its memory usage to that of other browsers instead of just throwing out numbers without anything to compare them to?
When the hell will the devs address the staggering memory leaks?
About 100 memory leaks in Firefox have been fixed in the past year. It wasn't leaking too badly last year, though. Which "staggering" leaks are you referring to? Do you have some specific Bugzilla bug reports you referring to?
If by "Mozilla" you mean only after they switched to the Gecko engine, they came up with XUL and XBL. If you count before when they were Netscape (remember even back then they had Mozilla in the user agent string, so were in some sense "Mozilla" then), they innovated a lot more web technologies we take for granted today.
You can't fix what you don't acknowledge. How convenient for you.
I can't acknowledge what I can't see. What about Firefox is slow? How would I see the problem? I and most others cannot see any problem, as demonstrated by this MozillaZine thread.
The problem seems to be the same problem users complain about on the Opera forums with Opera.
That's my observation as well. Modern browsers use lots of memory, especially on computers with lots of RAM. There doesn't seem to be any particular issue with Firefox using more memory than other browsers. Some users do report Firefox using lots of memory, but that usually ends up being extensions with serious memory leaks. I think the new cycle collector in Firefox 3 will at least sweep lots of those memory leaks under the rug.
It's no coincidence that the Reducing memory usage article mentions extensions, themes, and plugins as the main source of memory problems for Firefox users.
How can it be that storing visited pages takes so much memory that it only makes sense with more than 1GB of RAM?
It doesn't. Mozilla developers have said that an "average" page uses about 4 MB of RAM to cache in the back/forward cache. On a 1 GB machine, 8 of these pages are stored for an "average" cache size of 32 MB. If you have less than 1 GB, fewer than eight pages are stored to help save memory on systems that may not have that much memory to spare. In order for no pages to be stored by default, you would need less than 64 MB of RAM. You can read more in the browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers entry in the Knowledge Base.
Better yet, try the browser memory benchmark, which shows that Firefox 2 uses less memory than Opera 9 or IE 7. Again, now it's up to someone else to explain or demonstrate what Firefox's horrendous memory problem is. I still don't know anything about it yet, and apparently neither does anyone else.
I'm surprised that no one has called me on my claim yet, but here's a sample demonstration anyway. Open the following the links in your favorite browser, in the order listed, keeping the IDG site at the top after you're done: Shockwave site Java site Flash site
When I do that, VM Size goes over 150 MB and CPU usage goes over 20% in Firefox, IE, and Opera. It's not up to 250 MB and 50%, but you get the idea with just three tabs and a minute of browser usage. Just add a few more resource-heavy sites, and you can reach those numbers. Add in hours of heavy browsing on a variety of sites, and memory use in any browser can reach hundreds of megabytes.
Now it's time to provide the counter demonstration. Can someone provide a list of links that will cause Firefox to gobble up hideous amounts of memory, but not other browsers? If so, then finally we'll have some details about this problem once and for all!
No, it's not odd at all. Windows doesn't have horrible and obvious problems. I and many others use it without any major problems at all. Besides, so much software is available only for Windows that many people would need to run a Windows emulator in Linux. Why not just cut out the middleman and run Windows itself?
I'm no fan of Microsoft or Windows. It's a mediocre OS from a company well known for its mediocre software. But claiming that Windows has "horrible and obvious problems"? Give me a break!
I can demonstrate how to get Opera and IE to use 250 MB of memory and burn 50% CPU after minutes of use, so seeing that usage after a day of use doesn't necessarily indicate a problem. Can you give some specific details of a problem specifically in Firefox, rather than listing some symptoms that you could easily see in any browser?
I use Flash Shockwave and Shockwave for Director plugins all the time, and I never see the problem you're referring to. Did it ever occur to you that most other users don't see the problem, and that it could be a problem with your installation? Try looking in the Knowledge Base for a solution to your problem.
Thank you for demonstrating my point so well. This is exactly the type of response I see whenever I ask for details about a serious problem in Firefox. Oh, sometimes someone will give the URL of a page that supposedly Firefox has a problem with, but when we go to the page we see no problem. Whatever. The FUD isn't boosting Opera usage, so just give it up already.
Oh god, after five years, thousands of blog entries and flamewars and you want me to explain what the problem is? Are you serious?
Yes. If it's so obvious, shouldn't many people be able to explain it easily? Shouldn't it be understood and explained so well by now that you can easily point me to somewhere where the details are listed?
I've browsed Bugzilla, and I can't find anything more than the memory leaks I already see. I've even reported some of the memory leaks in Bugzilla myself. However, the memory leaks I'm seeing are much more subtle than the huge and obvious problem people keep talking about. It takes me a day or so to see Firefox leak any memory at all, and that's only when using a memory leak detection tool. I can't tell just by looking at the Mem Usage in the Windows Task Manager that any leak is occurring until after several days.
So yes, please tell me, what exactly is "Firefox's mysterious habit of gobbling up every remaining scrap of a computer's memory" and the "insane memory consumption it suffers from"? Frankly, I and many others can't see it no matter how hard we try!
What really odd is that when Opera's so wonderful, not having all the horrible and obvious problems that Firefox has, why don't more people simply use Opera instead?
The truth is that Firefox has had memory and speed problems since 1.x versions. At the very least, nobody can deny it for 1.5.+ versions.
And what exactly are these memory and speed problems? I and most others on MozillaZine never see these problems. When people do come in and say they have problems like these, we don't ever seem to be able to reproduce them. That doesn't mean they don't exist, but no one seems to know exactly what the problem is. If the problems were as widespread as you'd have us believe, they would have been described in detail and would be reported in Bugzilla, wouldn't they? Are there any specific problems in Firefox 2.0.0.3 you could point out?
Slashdot Mirror
And for most users, for whom Firefox uses no more memory than other browsers, continuing to post that Firefox has a serious memory issue makes _no_ difference. The only post that will make any difference is one that describes this memory issue in enough detail so that someone can write up a bug report. Until someone does that, it's pointless whining.
This will change somewhat with SeaMonkey 2, due out around the same time as Firefox 3. It dumps the old XPFE front-end in favor of Firefox's new toolkit front-end. This will reduce the amount of non-shared code, and make it easier to port non-shared code from Firefox and Thunderbird to SeaMonkey.
I left Firefox 2.0.0.3 open all night with the Google homepage and my Gmail inbox open in two tabs. When I first started, Firefox had 40 MB Mem Usage and 31 MB VM Size. This morning, Firefox had 40 MB Mem Usage and 31 MB VM Size. Maybe there's something critical you're leaving out of your steps to reproduce the problem. Or maybe something's just screwed up on your computer causing the excessive memory use. Try creating a new profile.
Ah, memory leaks when gmail is open. Now maybe we can discuss an actual, confirmed memory leak for a change. Of the six reported leaks with gmail, four are fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.3 and two seem to be Firefox 3 only. If you can still reproduce a memory leak with gmail up in Firefox 2.0.0.3, you should file a bug report to make sure the problem gets addressed. A browser using 1 GB of memory after a day of use certainly isn't reasonable. It sounds like a problem that should be fixed ASAP. Filing the bug report, including a set of steps to reproduce the problem, is the first step to getting it fixed.
Firefox 3 includes a cycle collector to handle these memory leaks in extensions, as well as some remaining memory leaks in Firefox itself.
If by "Mozilla" you mean only after they switched to the Gecko engine, they came up with XUL and XBL. If you count before when they were Netscape (remember even back then they had Mozilla in the user agent string, so were in some sense "Mozilla" then), they innovated a lot more web technologies we take for granted today.
It's no coincidence that the Reducing memory usage article mentions extensions, themes, and plugins as the main source of memory problems for Firefox users.
Try some of the suggestions in the Knowledge Base:_ Firefox
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_-
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_hangs
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_crashes
Better yet, try the browser memory benchmark, which shows that Firefox 2 uses less memory than Opera 9 or IE 7. Again, now it's up to someone else to explain or demonstrate what Firefox's horrendous memory problem is. I still don't know anything about it yet, and apparently neither does anyone else.
I'm surprised that no one has called me on my claim yet, but here's a sample demonstration anyway. Open the following the links in your favorite browser, in the order listed, keeping the IDG site at the top after you're done:
Shockwave site
Java site
Flash site
When I do that, VM Size goes over 150 MB and CPU usage goes over 20% in Firefox, IE, and Opera. It's not up to 250 MB and 50%, but you get the idea with just three tabs and a minute of browser usage. Just add a few more resource-heavy sites, and you can reach those numbers. Add in hours of heavy browsing on a variety of sites, and memory use in any browser can reach hundreds of megabytes.
Now it's time to provide the counter demonstration. Can someone provide a list of links that will cause Firefox to gobble up hideous amounts of memory, but not other browsers? If so, then finally we'll have some details about this problem once and for all!
No, it's not odd at all. Windows doesn't have horrible and obvious problems. I and many others use it without any major problems at all. Besides, so much software is available only for Windows that many people would need to run a Windows emulator in Linux. Why not just cut out the middleman and run Windows itself?
I'm no fan of Microsoft or Windows. It's a mediocre OS from a company well known for its mediocre software. But claiming that Windows has "horrible and obvious problems"? Give me a break!
I can demonstrate how to get Opera and IE to use 250 MB of memory and burn 50% CPU after minutes of use, so seeing that usage after a day of use doesn't necessarily indicate a problem. Can you give some specific details of a problem specifically in Firefox, rather than listing some symptoms that you could easily see in any browser?
I use Flash Shockwave and Shockwave for Director plugins all the time, and I never see the problem you're referring to. Did it ever occur to you that most other users don't see the problem, and that it could be a problem with your installation? Try looking in the Knowledge Base for a solution to your problem.
Exactly. 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Thank you for demonstrating my point so well. This is exactly the type of response I see whenever I ask for details about a serious problem in Firefox. Oh, sometimes someone will give the URL of a page that supposedly Firefox has a problem with, but when we go to the page we see no problem. Whatever. The FUD isn't boosting Opera usage, so just give it up already.
Yes. If it's so obvious, shouldn't many people be able to explain it easily? Shouldn't it be understood and explained so well by now that you can easily point me to somewhere where the details are listed?
I've browsed Bugzilla, and I can't find anything more than the memory leaks I already see. I've even reported some of the memory leaks in Bugzilla myself. However, the memory leaks I'm seeing are much more subtle than the huge and obvious problem people keep talking about. It takes me a day or so to see Firefox leak any memory at all, and that's only when using a memory leak detection tool. I can't tell just by looking at the Mem Usage in the Windows Task Manager that any leak is occurring until after several days.
So yes, please tell me, what exactly is "Firefox's mysterious habit of gobbling up every remaining scrap of a computer's memory" and the "insane memory consumption it suffers from"? Frankly, I and many others can't see it no matter how hard we try!
What really odd is that when Opera's so wonderful, not having all the horrible and obvious problems that Firefox has, why don't more people simply use Opera instead?