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Firefox 15 plugs the add-on leaks

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox 15 plugs the add-on leaks

#61

Post by twistedanimator »

tammer wrote: post #23
jvm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use FF for Vimperator/Pentadactyl. There's no equivalent in Chrome (and never will be because of Chrome's design choices), and it makes every other browser's interface feel hopelessly pedestrian to me now.

Precisely. I was a diehard chrome-lover until I tried pentadactyl. Now I realize that any tiny reduction in perceived speed (not due to slower JS or loading, but probably some of chrome's UI speed tricks) is made up for by the lack of a context switch between terminal and browser.

Unfortunately, pentadactyl doesn't seem to work with Firefox 15, so I guess I'll have to stay at 14. I tried both 1.0rc1 and the latest nightly and neither work.

Re: Firefox 15 plugs the add-on leaks

#62

Post by throwaway54-762 »

bru wrote: post #30
suprgeek wrote: post #18

I am very happy that the Firefox team has finally managed to lick this issue. When at every occasion I used to raise this issue, the typical Mozilla Evangelist would answer: "It is because of the add-ons". My counter to this was that the whole Raison d'être for Firefox is its add-ons community. You cannot claim that there are great benefits to this approach while simultaneously ignoring the problems caused by it. Bet…

>One is closed source Actually, so is Chrome.

You're free to run Chromium instead of Chrome. I do.

Re: Firefox 15 plugs the add-on leaks

#63

Post by rat87 »

tjoff wrote: post #36
rat87 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you use a lot of tabs and don't close your browser for long periods of time Chrome is vastly superior to Firefox (and all other browsers) in terms of memory use and stability. But not in terms of ui, tabs shrink till they hold no text in chrome instead of scrolling like in firefox.

I love the way chrome handles tabs, especially the way they shrink. The icon is enough to distinguish it and even if there is no icon for that page you already know its appromixmate position and can quickly find it (which you just can't when everything scrolls and you have no idea where you are). The firefox tab scroll feature is probably the feature I hate the most, in any browser (yes, you can disable it - but bad…

The icon frequently isn't enough to distinguish tabs especially if you have a bunch of reddit/hacker news/wikipedia/google/tvtropes tabs open. Once it has shrunk to nothing there is little chance of knowing what any tab is except when going back and forth between a couple of tabs. Firefox also has a drop down list and lets you switch to a tab by entering a partial title/address in the address bar.

I remember Firefox used to have the bad behaviour like chrome(back in the 1.5 days) and I would occasionally use an IE shell called crazy browser to do my extremely many tab surfing(I also used 2 browsers partially so I could surf something else while 70+ political blogs or webcomics were loading since browsers tended to freeze for a long time on that back in those days).

Re: Firefox 15 plugs the add-on leaks

#64

Post by alttab »

khuey wrote: post #46
alainbryden wrote: post #41

> Leaky add-ons usually cause zombie compartments by holding references to DOM structures within a web page even after the page has been closed or navigated away from. This prevents Firefox from garbage-collecting the page’s compartment. If an add-on relies on persistent references to closed pages by design (such as a form data history plugin), is there a way to adapt it to this new feature to not let Firefox sever i…

No.

Care to clarify?

Re: Firefox 15 plugs the add-on leaks

#65

Post by darkstalker »

pmarsh wrote: post #39

One of the issues I've seen people complain about is having to close Firefox after a few days. I understand you shouldn't HAVE to close a program, but how are people using their browsers that this becomes such an huge problem?

What's the purpose of leaving the browser open for several days?

Re: Firefox 15 plugs the add-on leaks

#66

Post by alttab »

antidoh wrote: post #48
jhatax wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox lost market share because Chrome was a leaner, faster, and better browser. I have started to hear more stories about folks switching back to Firefox because a lot of their issues with the browser have been fixed. And based on independent review sites like Tom's Hardware, there is no longer an appreciable gap in the performance of Firefox and Chrome. As regards market share, Firefox's market share would be in…

"I have started to hear more stories about folks switching back to Firefox because a lot of their issues with the browser have been fixed" There was a time, some number of releases ago (a year ago?) when FF's memory problems became too much for me, and I used Chrome(ium). I never liked it, personal preference. Finally some time within that last year FF became acceptable again, then more than acceptable, and I came ba…

As a dev I moved to chrome for all the reasons everyone else did. Now I'm seeing chrome renderer chewing all my ram across multiple processes, and actually have had it crash a number of times. Google, don't think I won't switch again, because I will.

Re: Firefox 15 plugs the add-on leaks

#68

Post by jfb »

That's a cool blog post, and kudos to the Mozilla people, but I have to wonder about the mindset of the user whose stuck with Firefox even as his setup was unusable to the point of needing to install a restart button add-on. I mean, I know from being habituated to a given routine, but that seems particularly self defeating behaviour, especially considering that decent alternatives to Firefox exist?

Re: Firefox 15 plugs the add-on leaks

#69

Post by dman »

jfb wrote: post #68

That's a cool blog post, and kudos to the Mozilla people, but I have to wonder about the mindset of the user whose stuck with Firefox even as his setup was unusable to the point of needing to install a restart button add-on . I mean, I know from being habituated to a given routine, but that seems particularly self defeating behaviour, especially considering that decent alternatives to Firefox exist?

I have a bunch of custom addons that I have written for my workflows - moving to other browsers is not an option because they arent as easily extensible as firefox.

Re: Firefox 15 plugs the add-on leaks

#70

Post by keeperofdakeys »

tjoff wrote: post #28
gjm11 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays Firefox typically uses less memory than Chrome (though of course this depends on exactly what you measure and how). It's highly debatable which is faster -- this depends even more on how you measure -- but Chrome certainly isn't miles ahead. Chrome may have all the extensions you currently use, but Firefox still has a lot more; perhaps the next one you'd find useful will be Firefox-only. None of which means…

If you use a lot of tabs and don't close your browser for long periods of time Chrome is vastly superior to Firefox (and all other browsers) in terms of memory use and stability. Even if you don't use any add-ons at all. I've always taken issue with Firefox, it has the broadest support and community centered around add-ons - but if you actually use any add-on the browser becomes completely useless. I've been bitten s…

> If you use a lot of tabs and don't close your browser for long periods of time Chrome is vastly superior to Firefox (and all other browsers) in terms of memory use and stability.

That has been the opposite of my experiences, I am sitting on 100 tabs with 800MB of memory used in firefox. Sometimes I have 200+ with 1.5 GB of ram used.

Actually, just looking at chrome://memory-redirect/ in Chrome, it compares firefox's and chrome's memory usage. Chromium 1,394,260k 877,088k (about 40 tabs) Firefox 889,576k 62,692k (about 100 tabs).

Now this is on Linux, but I haven't used Firefox on windows recently to compare properly. One good explanation for all this is that the tab-per-process model means that you have a memory overhead for each process, so you naturally have more memory usage per tab.

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