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Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

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Re: Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

#11
post #3

I'm using Firefox 5.0.1, I just clicked "Check for updates" and it said I'm up-to-date. Shouldn't 6 come out first? Isn't it too early to talk about 7? I think this is bad marketing from Mozilla, they're totally confusing people.

I'm not sure how much you're joking, but Mozilla is releasing 3 versions at a time. Release, Beta, and Aurora. Right now, Release is on version 5, Beta is 6, Aurora is 7. You can get them from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/

Re: Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

#12
post #3

I'm using Firefox 5.0.1, I just clicked "Check for updates" and it said I'm up-to-date. Shouldn't 6 come out first? Isn't it too early to talk about 7? I think this is bad marketing from Mozilla, they're totally confusing people.

Mozilla isn't marketing anything here. A journalist dug up information from a personal blog and the developer wiki.

Re: Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

#13
post #2

I'm reminded of MySQL. "You don't have transaction support" "Sure we do - just handle it in your code" "But I need transactions" "No you don't! That's just overarchitecting!" "No really I do" "Look how fast we are!" ... years later... "Hey look at MySQL - We have transactions! Look how great we are!" etc. I like FF. I use it. But every time there's some comment about FF memory, we usually see a bunch of people coming…

You often see the same pattern with OS.

  User4,27,128: "I think there might be an issue."
  Fanboy37,652: "What are you talking about? This is the best thing ever!!!"  
  Fanboy23,418: "That easy to fix, just type everything backward while singing and it all works fine!!1!"
  ...
  Dev15: "Fixed problem 4,129"
  Fanboy37,652: "Now that that's fixed, this is the best thing ever!!1!"

Re: Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

#14
It's not that Firefox is actually using that much memory. It's not even that it has a memory leak in the usual sense of a broken garbage collector or something. It all down to memory fragmentation. You can see illustrations of browser memory fragmentation here: http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/10/memory-fragmentation/ Firefox switched to jemalloc in 2008, which cut memory usage to less than half. http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/

Re: Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

#16
post #2

I'm reminded of MySQL. "You don't have transaction support" "Sure we do - just handle it in your code" "But I need transactions" "No you don't! That's just overarchitecting!" "No really I do" "Look how fast we are!" ... years later... "Hey look at MySQL - We have transactions! Look how great we are!" etc. I like FF. I use it. But every time there's some comment about FF memory, we usually see a bunch of people coming…

You often see the same pattern with OS. User4,27,128: "I think there might be an issue." Fanboy37,652: "What are you talking about? This is the best thing ever!!!" Fanboy23,418: "That easy to fix, just type everything backward while singing and it all works fine!!1!" ... Dev15: "Fixed problem 4,129" Fanboy37,652: "Now that that's fixed, this is the best thing ever!!1!"

As long as the devs stay sane it's not too much of a problem.

Re: Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

#17
post #2

I'm reminded of MySQL. "You don't have transaction support" "Sure we do - just handle it in your code" "But I need transactions" "No you don't! That's just overarchitecting!" "No really I do" "Look how fast we are!" ... years later... "Hey look at MySQL - We have transactions! Look how great we are!" etc. I like FF. I use it. But every time there's some comment about FF memory, we usually see a bunch of people coming…

  > I like FF. I use it. But every time there's some comment
  > about FF memory, we usually see a bunch of people coming
  > out saying they never see FF memory issues, the OP must be
  > doing something wrong or have a bad system, they use their
  > computer non-stop for 4 years without ever even seeing FF
  > slow down, etc.
That's because complaints about large memory use in Firefox fall into two camps, generally:

1. "I left Firefox on overnight with three tabs open, and now it's using 3.1 GiB of memory. This browser is terrible! Yes, I do have dozens of low-quality extensions installed, so?"

2. "I started Firefox, and already it's using over 300 MiB! That's insane! Why would a web browser ever use that much? I'm switching to Chrome, it only uses 100 MiB. What do you mean, 'multiple processes'?"

There may in fact be genuine issues buried somewhere in the discussion, but they're hard to discern against the general background noise.

  > Then endless discussion about "how can you even function
  > having more than 2 tabs open? I always close all mine
  > because of some cognition study from 1974 which I read in
  > my one open tab, then closed it".
You're getting confused between Firefox and Chrome. Firefox has always been the browser of choice for the "tons of tabs" crowd, because Chrome's process-per-tab model breaks down when there's more than a few dozen open.

For example, I have just over 70 tabs open right now, Firefox has been running for about a month, and it's at 1.1 GiB resident memory. Chrome becomes very unhappy under such circumstances (since it uses about ~100 MiB per tab), so I'm careful to only open a few tabs at a time.

Re: Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

#19
post #3

I'm using Firefox 5.0.1, I just clicked "Check for updates" and it said I'm up-to-date. Shouldn't 6 come out first? Isn't it too early to talk about 7? I think this is bad marketing from Mozilla, they're totally confusing people.

I think Firefox is trying to adopt the Chrome model, which is that version numbers are for the developers only. End users shouldn't need to know which version they're running.

Re: Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

#20
post #14

It's not that Firefox is actually using that much memory. It's not even that it has a memory leak in the usual sense of a broken garbage collector or something. It all down to memory fragmentation. You can see illustrations of browser memory fragmentation here: http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/10/memory-fragmentation/ Firefox switched to jemalloc in 2008, which cut memory usage to less than half. http://blog.pavlov.net…

Many of the Firefox 7 fixes that reduced memory usage did not have to do with fragmentation; there were a number of true memory leaks fixed, and other bugs where code was allocating more memory than it ever could need.

(For example, I think there was a bug where the find-as-you-type bar could keep the page in memory forever if it wasn't dismissed.)

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