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Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

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Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#91

Post by ehsanu1 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #62
dangoor wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, Firefox developers care a good deal about memory management. More than Add-on authors unfortunately. We've had a project called MemShrink running for about a year and it has been making steady progress. and that progress has been shipping to users. The current Aurora channel release even has a fix for most add-on bad behavior. Firefox actually stacks up really well in memory usage (even in third party tests…

I quit firefox purely over its tendency to leak my entire RAM and force restarts. I was told at the time, and do believe, that the memory leaking was an addon problem. However... firefox was sold on the idea of addons. When your two main messages are "we're the most convenient browser; just look at all our awesome addons!" and "you can't use the addons, or your computer will implode", you've got a serious problem.

So they actually had a great fix recently where they managed to largely stop addons from causing memory leaks: http://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memshrink/

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#92

Post by dbaupp »

slurgfest wrote: post #37
earl wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing is that Chrome updates work. They've only broken something once in I think 3 years of daily use at this point (some update unchecked "warn before quitting"). They also don't generally create popups and the update process itself is literally invisible. Firefox on the other hand... sigh. I really liked that browser, but the updates, and the broken plugins, and the shit memory management, and the develop…

Memory management was terrible for ages and ages before the updates. I don't think the updates ever broke memory management. if you don't use addons, the memory management in Firefox is pretty good - actually measure it competitively against Chrome sometime

I find it is much better than Chrome.

If I have more than a handful of tabs open in Chrome then Chrome starts using significantly more than a GB of RAM (in total, across all the separate Chrome processes), while I've currently got a Firefox session that has been open for more than a week, with 30+ tabs, and is using just under 1 GB.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#93

Post by smsm42 »

streptomycin wrote: post #82
smsm42 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progress is nice, but unfortunately as a user I don't care too much about progress if the bottom line is the same. Sorry to sound disdainful about your efforts, and I know how hard it is, and I have greatest respect for the efforts of Firefox developers, but the bottom line is - it is (was, last time I checked) still leaking like Eratosthenes' sieve, and still becomes unusable after mere days of work. And even admira…

> still leaking like Eratosthenes' sieve It leaks a lot when it's using a tiny amount of memory, and it leaks hardly at all when it's using a large amount of memory?

No, it leaks endlessly without any theoretical bounds and there's no amount of memory that it's leaking won't exceed given enough time.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#94

Post by smsm42 »

thristian wrote: post #84
smsm42 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progress is nice, but unfortunately as a user I don't care too much about progress if the bottom line is the same. Sorry to sound disdainful about your efforts, and I know how hard it is, and I have greatest respect for the efforts of Firefox developers, but the bottom line is - it is (was, last time I checked) still leaking like Eratosthenes' sieve, and still becomes unusable after mere days of work. And even admira…

To counter your anecdote with another, different anecdote with more numbers in it, back in the days of Firefox 4 and subsequent versions, it would not be unusual for my Firefox to hit 500MB to 1GB of RAM usage after a day of browsing. Right now, my Firefox 15 has been running for a day, and about:memory says the total is 363.26MB. Firefox has slimmed down a lot in the past year.

Well, maybe I'll give it a try soon again. I did about a year ago and was re-disappointed.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#95

Post by Tangaroa »

city41 wrote: post #80

One thing I've not seen anyone bring up in the comments here is Chrome updates just as often as Firefox does. Chrome might even update more often than Firefox does. I don't know because Chrome solved the rapid update problem exceptionally well . Chrome could update every hour and I probably wouldn't even notice, let alone care. Rapid updates in and of themselves are not the problem here.

Here are the two major problems that I see in Mozilla's "rapid updates" process:

1) Interruption of user work process

Firefox freezes for a few seconds at startup to see if there are any updates to the core or plugins. If this were handled in the background in a separate thread that did not freeze the browser, no one would care about it except for privacy advocates who don't want their version number being leaked.

Then there are the popups and request to reboot that also interrupt the user's work process, given that the user has probably been trying to get work done while the download was going on.

2) Stupid versioning

For as long as software version numbers have existed, most vendors have used the major.minor.patch pattern. A change in the major version number usually means a break in the public API, so software vendors provide a different API library for every major version that they release, and they allow plugins to decide what API version to use.

Mozilla decided to increase their _major_ version number for every _patch_. Firefox's latest version 420 or however high they are now should probably be something like 4.2.20. The stupid numbering will only annoy users who expect Mozilla to follow best software development practices, but it shouldn't affect plugins. If Firefox is doing their updates correctly, they will be exposing a separate API library for every major version update that they've done in their rapid major version update schedule.

Of course, they're doing it wrong. Plugins built for version 4 or version 5 no longer work because FF is only providing the latest API version 420, and only until next week when 421 comes out. Mozilla's solution is for all plugin vendors to update their plugins after every FF update, and for users to wait until the plugin vendors have done this.

There would be no plugin breakage if Mozilla had updated the patch and minor version numbers for non-breaking updates. I've said this on /. but the Moz devs argued that their choice was between rapid major version updates or no updates at all. I find that hard to believe. Something is wrong with their toolkit if they cannot support minor version number updates.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#97

Post by fallous »

dredmorbius wrote: post #17
smacktoward wrote: post #12

I think the takeaway from this should be slightly different than the one the author found: don't fight users' expectations of what your product is. When Chrome came out, it was a new product; users had no expectations of "what Chrome is." So Google could do with it essentially whatever they wanted. Firefox was in a completely different position. When Mozilla moved Firefox to rapid release, the product branded "Firefo…

Very well said. Previously, when I went to a new browser experience, I generally went to a new browser. There was Mosaic. Then Netscape. Then Galeon. Then Konqueror. Then Mozilla. Then Firefox. Galeon was probably the most jarring of the bunch. It started as a highly power-user friendly advanced (for the time) browser. Then the GNOME project "adopted" it as its default browser ... and instilled it with "simple user"…

Mozilla kept me from Firefox for years. The idiotic "view source" that actually re-fetched the page made it utterly worthless for development and when the bugs were filed, they were promptly ignored.

That said, with the except of one FF push on OSX that broke Netflix for a few days I've been pleased with the changes. Safari's constant memory leaks drove me nuts, FF leaking memory wasn't as bad but certainly annoyed. They've solved that problem for my usage and having suffered with Chrome "dev tools" I continue to use FF and Firebug for front-end work when need be.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#98

Post by Tloewald »

The big problem with Firefox updates for me, and this predates the rapid release BS, is that they occur when you launch Firefox, wasting your time precisely when you're in a hurry. If they just waited until you were idle and then updated in the background they'd be hugely better. (Extra points for figuring out if compatible versions of plugins are available yet first, downloading them too, etc.)

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#99

Post by grabastic »

uxp wrote: post #88
breadbox wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which, ironically, is almost as bad, when you suddenly realize that you basically let Chrome change the UI, and there's no way to return to the UI you once knew.

Except that Chrome has never really changed it's UI. The presentation at the end of Google's 2012 IO Day 2 keynote actually timelapses through the UI. The only change is the removal of the home button outside of general micro-tweaks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPtJd6AzU8c&feature=playe...

Although... to my great frustration, Chrome has made pretty big changes to their preferences pages over time.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#100

Post by azakai »

Silhouette wrote: post #22
maratd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They kind of took a stab at solving this. Firefox ESR. It's what Firefox used to be.

The thing is, even the ESR is only supported for about a year before being completely cut off in favour of a new ESR that has only been available for about 6-12 weeks at that point. There are some large businesses out there who run the same software foundation for a decade or more, not least because just evaluating a new version of something critical like an operating system or web browser can be a huge exercise if y…

> The thing is, even the ESR is only supported for about a year before being completely cut off in favour of a new ESR that has only been available for about 6-12 weeks at that point. There are some large businesses out there who run the same software foundation for a decade or more.

For software like that, a web browser is not the right platform. Web browsers view a shared space which constantly changes and gets updated with new APIs and deprecated APIs and so forth.

If you want decade-long stability, use a platform that is tightly controlled and gives guarantees of backwards compatibility, for example Java or .NET.

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