I have had Firefox 3 beta 3 open for a week with several tabs open at all times (including opening and closing tabs regularly) and it's consumed less than 200 MB of RAM. I see other people in this discussion saying they never see a memory problem in Firefox. In another recent article, there were at least two other posters who said they keep Firefox running for one or two weeks and it doesn't use more than a few hundred MB. Anyway, when you give a set of steps to reproduce a bug, you should give the specific steps to perform.
To be fair, Firefox is now faster than Opera at one particular JavaScript benchmark. Opera may still be faster at rendering pages or in the JavaScript on a site you frequent. But, yes, it does look like a large increase in overall JavaScript performance for Firefox.
I agree. It is not a feature. It is a bug. Now that we've got that out of the way, can you give us steps to reproduce the bug? Unless we have steps to reliably reproduce the problem, we cannot file a bug report and the problem cannot be fixed.
Uh, wouldn't you have to run the tests for different browsers on your computer? How can you compare the time it took your computer to run a test in IE 8 Beta 1 with the time it took a different computer to run the test in a different browser?
My point is simply that adhering to standards is a priority for Mozilla, contrary to what the OP was trying to imply. For all we know, the only reason that IE 8 Beta 1 passes Acid2 (or comes very close) is because of public builds of Firefox that pass Acid2, which have been available for over a year. Let's face it, knowing that Firefox 3 will be released in 2008 and passes Acid2 probably motivated the MS developers to make IE 8 pass Acid2 also. It seems to me that any way you look at it, IE is still playing catch-up to the other browsers, which all support web standards far better than IE does.
Why hasn't anyone else found it and made a patch or plugin or something?
Because there isn't one. It's absolutely ludicrous to think the Mozilla developers cannot find and fix a terrible, obvious memory leak. No one can even explain how we would see such a memory leak. At least, whenever I try to follow the steps people give me to reproduce the problem, Firefox usually uses less memory than other browsers. If anyone still thinks there's any kind of memory problem in Firefox, explain how we could see it. That way, we could file a bug report and get the problem fixed.
If you see the problem, you should report it as a bug. Please give the steps we would have to follow to see the problem you describe, and we can write up a bug report. That way, the problem could be fixed.
That was not a final release. The general public doesn't use prereleases, and so prereleases don't count.
We're talking about the Acid2 test, right? The general public does not care about which browsers pass Acid2. Only web developers care. Once all popular browsers pass Acid2, they can use the features it tests. It doesn't matter whether Safari, Opera, and Firefox passed within three days of release of the Acid2 test. Web developers would still be waiting on IE to pass so they can finally use the features that Acid2 tests are have some confidence that all browsers would render their pages correctly.
That switch has been removed, and it was the only remaining obstacle.
Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit company, as is Microsoft, Apple, and Opera ASA. Why complain only about Mozilla? In fact, the other companies that make popular browsers are publicly owned, so they must answer to their shareholders. Mozilla, being privately owned, has the freedom to do whatever they like, such as give money away to support open source.
That shouldn't be happening. Either that's a bug in Firefox, in which case you should give the exact steps to reproduce the problem so it can be fixed. Or it's a problem on your computer, in which case you should follow the advice in the Knowledge Base to fix it.
I've gotten patches accepted by the Mozilla team. It's tedious, but not difficult. It may take a few minutes to write a small patch of a few lines, but then you may need to spend an hour making sure the patch gets reviewed and super-reviewed, and then find someone to check it in. Also, if you submit a patch to fix a bug, you shouldn't have to maintain it. Generally, ones bugs are fixed they remain fixed.
And anyway, if you think there's some sort of memory problem in Firefox, you should give the set of steps to reproduce it if you want it fixed. I'm still waiting on someone to demonstrate how I can get Firefox to eat up all the memory on my computer. I've run Firefox 3 beta 3 for about a week, and it strayed over 200 MB only occasionally, only to fall back below 200 MB.
Actually, memory matters more for browsing. You have a bounded amount of memory, and if you use it all up, you're screwed. You always have more time (unless you're running a hard real-time system), so if a process takes all the CPU, other processes will simply run more slowly and you just have to wait longer. If you are in fact running a process that has a hard real-time component, you should set the processor priorities so a low-priority process such as browsing should not affect it.
You're right. Flamebait is unfair. It's actually funny, seeing as how believing that Firefox somehow has one awful and obvious memory leak that developers can't seem to find is ludicrous.
Firefox released a public build that passed Acid2 in December 2006. According to some sources (including Ian Hickson, who developed the Acid2 test), IE 8 Beta 1 still does not pass. Firefox (along with Opera and Safari) has far surpassed IE in standards compliance. I'd say supporting standards is definitely a priority for Mozilla. Can we stop it with the Firefox FUD? I thought we were glad that Firefox is helping to get MS off its rear to get IE up to speed with the other browsers?
Try reading the Acid3 test description, which is entirely relevant to this thread. It does not appear that Acid3 tests CSS3 selectors. I don't think that KHTML developers are contributing much to Safari doing well on Acid3. It's mostly Safari developers.
I was also using Mozilla all during 2001, when it was common on Slashdot for people so say that Mozilla 1.0 would never be released. I never thought that it was "doomed to failure". I saw it as the alternative browser with the most potential, even though Opera was more popular then. It had, and still has, far better standards support than IE. IE isn't even anywhere near catching up to the other popular browsers in standards support.
WebKit is forked from KHTML, so are any fixes to KHTML being ported to WebKit? Even if so, I don't think KHTML developers are contributing much to Safari doing better on Acid3 recently. And aren't the developers who do most of the work on WebKit mostly Safari developers working for Apple, just like the developers who do most of the work on Gecko are mostly Firefox developers working for Mozilla? It seems like it's Safari developers contributing the most to development builds of Safari doing better on Acid3, just the same way it's Firefox developers contributing the most to development builds of Firefox doing better on Acid3.
You don't. On the other hand, if there is a flaw in Acid3, it will be found as the developers of web browsers attempt to pass it. Safari developers found a flaw in Acid2.
The 100 subtests are nearly independent of each other. It's possible for a browser to fail a subtest simply because it failed an earlier subtest, but failing one subtest is not going to make a browser skip a major portion of the test. You can click on the A in Acid3 after the test is completed to see a report of exactly which tests failed.
Safari development builds are doing well on Acid3, and Safari passed Acid2 quickly, because Safari developers fixed the problems that the Acid tests demonstrate. If you look at the stable release builds of Safari, they do far worse than the stable release builds of Opera and Firefox. But if you look at the latest development builds, Safari does far better than Opera and Firefox. Safari is doing well on Acid tests because the developers put a lot of effort into making Safari do well on Acid tests, not because Safari is "ahead of the game" on standards.
There's far too much bickering about which browser is best and which browser is behind the curve. It seems that Safari, Opera, and Firefox are all very good browsers each with their own strengths in standards compliance and user interface, with IE constantly playing catch-up.
I see what you're saying. Yes, most people do not decide to buy Windows, but simply buy a computer and it happens to come with Windows. But many people do specifically buy Windows computers as opposed to a computer with Linux. MS makes money off those people.
Of course, but you can get Java compilers, JVMs, and Linux distributions from multiple vendors for free. You must pay Microsoft if you want to run Windows, IE, Office, Outlook, Exchange, ASP, etc. That's why it's called vendor lock-in, because those products are available from only one vendor.
Geologic evidence, including radiological dating and tectonic theory, put the age of the Earth at billions of years. Take a geology class.
The age of the falls at Niagara may be 6000 years, but that says nothing about the age of the Earth.
There is good evidence that what we see in the Universe did start in a hot, dense state billions of years ago. Take some astronomy classes.
Actually, the sun was much cooler billions of years ago, as main sequence stars get hotter as they age.
There is good evidence that the moon formed in a collision between the Earth and a Mars-sized planet billions of years ago.
I'm not going to go on. The page simply lists any evidence at all for possibly suggesting that the Earth is only thousands of years old, no matter how flimsy. It's all debunked easily by our modern scientific understanding.
Slashdot Mirror
I have had Firefox 3 beta 3 open for a week with several tabs open at all times (including opening and closing tabs regularly) and it's consumed less than 200 MB of RAM. I see other people in this discussion saying they never see a memory problem in Firefox. In another recent article, there were at least two other posters who said they keep Firefox running for one or two weeks and it doesn't use more than a few hundred MB. Anyway, when you give a set of steps to reproduce a bug, you should give the specific steps to perform.
To be fair, Firefox is now faster than Opera at one particular JavaScript benchmark. Opera may still be faster at rendering pages or in the JavaScript on a site you frequent. But, yes, it does look like a large increase in overall JavaScript performance for Firefox.
I agree. It is not a feature. It is a bug. Now that we've got that out of the way, can you give us steps to reproduce the bug? Unless we have steps to reliably reproduce the problem, we cannot file a bug report and the problem cannot be fixed.
Congratulations! Your phrase for today is: false dichotomy.
Uh, wouldn't you have to run the tests for different browsers on your computer? How can you compare the time it took your computer to run a test in IE 8 Beta 1 with the time it took a different computer to run the test in a different browser?
My point is simply that adhering to standards is a priority for Mozilla, contrary to what the OP was trying to imply. For all we know, the only reason that IE 8 Beta 1 passes Acid2 (or comes very close) is because of public builds of Firefox that pass Acid2, which have been available for over a year. Let's face it, knowing that Firefox 3 will be released in 2008 and passes Acid2 probably motivated the MS developers to make IE 8 pass Acid2 also. It seems to me that any way you look at it, IE is still playing catch-up to the other browsers, which all support web standards far better than IE does.
If you see the problem, you should report it as a bug. Please give the steps we would have to follow to see the problem you describe, and we can write up a bug report. That way, the problem could be fixed.
We're talking about the Acid2 test, right? The general public does not care about which browsers pass Acid2. Only web developers care. Once all popular browsers pass Acid2, they can use the features it tests. It doesn't matter whether Safari, Opera, and Firefox passed within three days of release of the Acid2 test. Web developers would still be waiting on IE to pass so they can finally use the features that Acid2 tests are have some confidence that all browsers would render their pages correctly.
No, the switch was not the only remaining obstacle. IE 8 Beta 1 does not pass Acid2 according to Ian Hickson because of improper cross-domain checks, not because of the meta tag.
Which would those be? According to Webdevout, Firefox compares favorably to Opera in terms of standards support. And they both blow IE away.Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit company, as is Microsoft, Apple, and Opera ASA. Why complain only about Mozilla? In fact, the other companies that make popular browsers are publicly owned, so they must answer to their shareholders. Mozilla, being privately owned, has the freedom to do whatever they like, such as give money away to support open source.
That shouldn't be happening. Either that's a bug in Firefox, in which case you should give the exact steps to reproduce the problem so it can be fixed. Or it's a problem on your computer, in which case you should follow the advice in the Knowledge Base to fix it.
I've gotten patches accepted by the Mozilla team. It's tedious, but not difficult. It may take a few minutes to write a small patch of a few lines, but then you may need to spend an hour making sure the patch gets reviewed and super-reviewed, and then find someone to check it in. Also, if you submit a patch to fix a bug, you shouldn't have to maintain it. Generally, ones bugs are fixed they remain fixed.
And anyway, if you think there's some sort of memory problem in Firefox, you should give the set of steps to reproduce it if you want it fixed. I'm still waiting on someone to demonstrate how I can get Firefox to eat up all the memory on my computer. I've run Firefox 3 beta 3 for about a week, and it strayed over 200 MB only occasionally, only to fall back below 200 MB.
Actually, memory matters more for browsing. You have a bounded amount of memory, and if you use it all up, you're screwed. You always have more time (unless you're running a hard real-time system), so if a process takes all the CPU, other processes will simply run more slowly and you just have to wait longer. If you are in fact running a process that has a hard real-time component, you should set the processor priorities so a low-priority process such as browsing should not affect it.
You're right. Flamebait is unfair. It's actually funny, seeing as how believing that Firefox somehow has one awful and obvious memory leak that developers can't seem to find is ludicrous.
Firefox released a public build that passed Acid2 in December 2006. According to some sources (including Ian Hickson, who developed the Acid2 test), IE 8 Beta 1 still does not pass. Firefox (along with Opera and Safari) has far surpassed IE in standards compliance. I'd say supporting standards is definitely a priority for Mozilla. Can we stop it with the Firefox FUD? I thought we were glad that Firefox is helping to get MS off its rear to get IE up to speed with the other browsers?
Try reading the Acid3 test description, which is entirely relevant to this thread. It does not appear that Acid3 tests CSS3 selectors. I don't think that KHTML developers are contributing much to Safari doing well on Acid3. It's mostly Safari developers.
I was also using Mozilla all during 2001, when it was common on Slashdot for people so say that Mozilla 1.0 would never be released. I never thought that it was "doomed to failure". I saw it as the alternative browser with the most potential, even though Opera was more popular then. It had, and still has, far better standards support than IE. IE isn't even anywhere near catching up to the other popular browsers in standards support.
WebKit is forked from KHTML, so are any fixes to KHTML being ported to WebKit? Even if so, I don't think KHTML developers are contributing much to Safari doing better on Acid3 recently. And aren't the developers who do most of the work on WebKit mostly Safari developers working for Apple, just like the developers who do most of the work on Gecko are mostly Firefox developers working for Mozilla? It seems like it's Safari developers contributing the most to development builds of Safari doing better on Acid3, just the same way it's Firefox developers contributing the most to development builds of Firefox doing better on Acid3.
You don't. On the other hand, if there is a flaw in Acid3, it will be found as the developers of web browsers attempt to pass it. Safari developers found a flaw in Acid2.
The 100 subtests are nearly independent of each other. It's possible for a browser to fail a subtest simply because it failed an earlier subtest, but failing one subtest is not going to make a browser skip a major portion of the test. You can click on the A in Acid3 after the test is completed to see a report of exactly which tests failed.
Safari development builds are doing well on Acid3, and Safari passed Acid2 quickly, because Safari developers fixed the problems that the Acid tests demonstrate. If you look at the stable release builds of Safari, they do far worse than the stable release builds of Opera and Firefox. But if you look at the latest development builds, Safari does far better than Opera and Firefox. Safari is doing well on Acid tests because the developers put a lot of effort into making Safari do well on Acid tests, not because Safari is "ahead of the game" on standards.
There's far too much bickering about which browser is best and which browser is behind the curve. It seems that Safari, Opera, and Firefox are all very good browsers each with their own strengths in standards compliance and user interface, with IE constantly playing catch-up.
Actually, according to multiple sources, Firefox 2.0.0.12 score 50%, lower than Firefox 3 builds. No, the quality of Firefox is not decreasing.
I see what you're saying. Yes, most people do not decide to buy Windows, but simply buy a computer and it happens to come with Windows. But many people do specifically buy Windows computers as opposed to a computer with Linux. MS makes money off those people.
Of course, but you can get Java compilers, JVMs, and Linux distributions from multiple vendors for free. You must pay Microsoft if you want to run Windows, IE, Office, Outlook, Exchange, ASP, etc. That's why it's called vendor lock-in, because those products are available from only one vendor.
- Not scientific evidence. It's historical.
- Geologic evidence, including radiological dating and tectonic theory, put the age of the Earth at billions of years. Take a geology class.
- The age of the falls at Niagara may be 6000 years, but that says nothing about the age of the Earth.
- There is good evidence that what we see in the Universe did start in a hot, dense state billions of years ago. Take some astronomy classes.
- Actually, the sun was much cooler billions of years ago, as main sequence stars get hotter as they age.
- There is good evidence that the moon formed in a collision between the Earth and a Mars-sized planet billions of years ago.
I'm not going to go on. The page simply lists any evidence at all for possibly suggesting that the Earth is only thousands of years old, no matter how flimsy. It's all debunked easily by our modern scientific understanding.