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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

#31

Post by mgkimsal »

scott_s wrote: post #19
Maro wrote: 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.

except for when things go wrong and they just say "I'm using firefox and your site is broken".

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

#33

Post by grimen »

Well, even with that it won't be comparable to Chrome I'm afraid. Firefox became very heavy suring the years. And no I don't have a lot of add-ons; I have 2 addons in FF and 15 addons in Chrome and yet Chrome processes suck much less memory even if i run it for days without closing. People switching to Chrome is not just PR, really.

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

#34

Post by capnrefsmmat »

fedorabbit wrote: post #22
AndyKelley wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with using that metric is that the "feel" of a program is directly related to the UI changes that the version employs. You could change absolutely nothing bug and feature wise, but do a UI redesign and the new version would feel like it was updated a whole bunch.

What's wrong with subversion system for bug fixes? So, you mean they fixed so many bugs, improved so many back-end features in Firefox 4, which perfectly justifies a version jump from 4 to 7? I seem to remember old days Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 took forever...

They're not jumping from 4 to 7. 5 has been released; 6 will be released soon; 7 will be released six weeks after that. It's a time-based schedule with a new version number every six weeks.

Mozilla was sick of defining features for a given version and then delaying releases for months because of too-ambitious goals, so they switched to a whatever-is-done-by-the-deadline system. Version numbers aren't particularly meaningful.

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

#35

Post by capnrefsmmat »

hack_edu wrote: post #24

Since when has Firefox/Mozilla NOT promised that their next release will manage memory better?

They've started getting more serious about it. One of their big new JavaScript performance features, type inference, was backed out as soon as they realized it causes significantly increased memory usage -- and it won't get back in until it slims down, despite significant JS performance benefits. In the past, many features slipped in with memory problems and weren't noticed for months or years.

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

#37

Post by mbrubeck »

u48998 wrote: post #32

Could someone help identify why Firefox saves and keeps such a ridiculous number of Cache folders in \\Application Data\...\Profiles\... They're all 0, 1, 2...and then 01, 0A, 0B. I mean, what's the point here?

Filesystem performance tends to degrade when you have tens of thousands of files in a single directory, so programs that manage thousands of files usually end up dividing them into many subdirectories. It's not just Firefox - git uses the same strategy, for example.

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

#38

Post by benmccann »

crikli wrote: post #23
jmillikin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I have just over 70 tabs open... I'm really curious about this as once I get to about 10 tabs my brain starts wanting to close them to get back to something it can manage. This is either because I'm dumb (highly likely) or because you have a different usage style than I (also likely). So if you don't mind elaborating, how do you get to where you have that many tabs open?

I always have tons of tabs open. I have 25 open at the moment.

Usually, I'll have about half a dozen windows open with about half a dozen tabs each. I group the tabs together so that each window holds similar tabs, so it's not really 30 things I'm keeping track of but more like 5-6. E.g. right now I have one window where I was checking finance related news, stock quotes, etc. One window with a bug report and several tabs open looking at relevant source code and google searches related to investigating the problem. I've got one window that's my mail. I've got one window with a few HN stories open.

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

#39

Post by kodablah »

crikli wrote: post #23
jmillikin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I have just over 70 tabs open... I'm really curious about this as once I get to about 10 tabs my brain starts wanting to close them to get back to something it can manage. This is either because I'm dumb (highly likely) or because you have a different usage style than I (also likely). So if you don't mind elaborating, how do you get to where you have that many tabs open?

Tree style tabs[1] have changed my life. There are plenty of times I get near 100 tabs. It automatically opens them as subtabs when ctrl or middle clicked. This is great when browsing source trees online via github, google code, etc.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

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

#40

Post by qlkzy »

crikli wrote: post #23
jmillikin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I have just over 70 tabs open... I'm really curious about this as once I get to about 10 tabs my brain starts wanting to close them to get back to something it can manage. This is either because I'm dumb (highly likely) or because you have a different usage style than I (also likely). So if you don't mind elaborating, how do you get to where you have that many tabs open?

I use Pentadactyl (formerly Vimperator), and hide the tab bar entirely. 'Number of tabs' then becomes pretty meaningless, as all tab-switching is based on a history stack and regular expressions (a la Emacs buffers), so one just lets the buffer list grow. I only notice when there's a noticeable slowdown (which on this Core i7 with 3GiB RAM starts around 180 tabs).
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