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Firefox, Heal Thyself

blog.mozilla.org

1–10 of 107 posts

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#3

> and your browser can start healing itself I wonder what some specifics are for this statement.

One way, which is admittedly heavy-handed, is already available. If you go to Help->Troubleshooting Information, there's a button to "Reset Firefox". https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi... Hopefully future releases will automatically detect problems in individual subsystems and give you more fine-grained control.

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#5
post #4

Will this help them figure out that they need to fix memory leaks?

They're already fixing memory leaks. In fact, Firefox now uses less memory than Chrome.

Let me guess, you're another person who hasn't used Firefox in a few years hasn't bothered to check out the latest versions at all? :)

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#6
post #4

Will this help them figure out that they need to fix memory leaks?

Browse over to about:memory

I run nightly and I don't use addons beyond adblock and don't run flash so perhaps my experiences are different, but I haven't had problems with Firefox leaking memory in a couple years. The profiling tools at about:memory may let you see where things are breaking.

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#7
post #4

Will this help them figure out that they need to fix memory leaks?

The Firefox team has huge initiative to fix memory issue called MemShrink[1]. One of the devs blogs regularly about it[2].

I don't know much about this Health Report and memory leaks, but one the blogs on MemShrink said that to fix memory issues (leaks and memory bloat), they needed to measure what and how Firefox is using memory. There is now an about:memory page the gives a great breakdown, though it is very dev oriented and easy to copy/paste into bugs.

One of the big items that caused memory leaks is plugins. With FF15[3], made a change to find a very common type of leak with plugins that and free that memory.

If you haven't tried seriously FF in the past year, then give it another go. It is much better.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memshrink/ [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/07/19/firefox-15-p...

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#8
Part of this is somewhat similar to how Windows 8 measures "Start-up impact" of applications that auto-start, and allows you to disable them with two clicks. (In task manager)

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#10
post #5
post #4

Will this help them figure out that they need to fix memory leaks?

They're already fixing memory leaks. In fact, Firefox now uses less memory than Chrome. Let me guess, you're another person who hasn't used Firefox in a few years hasn't bothered to check out the latest versions at all? :)

It is rather unfortunate that there was a couple years there that FF lagged behind Chrome, it is really still having lasting impact on the brand.

That said, the developer tools (both Firebug and the newer native ones) are really just not on par with Chrome now. I know they have people working on it, so I am looking forward to what they come up with.

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