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Firefox, Heal Thyself

blog.mozilla.org

11–20 of 107 posts

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#11
I'm not sure if this applies, but I really hope they provide better tools to identify badly behaving webpages. Sometimes when my CPU or memory are being cranked by Firefox, I really just want to kill the one tab out of 50 that's causing all the problems.

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#12
post #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)

Internet Explorer will even tell you how long each plugin takes to start. You can see the stats in [Gear icon]-> Manage Add-ons. My slowest plugin is actually Google Chrome Frame :p

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#13
post #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.

Yup, this is currently the best and quickest way to fix problems with Firefox. If you set up sync, you can reset browser and reload context (extensions, settings, history, passwords, ...) in a few minutes.

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#14
Funnily enough, Firefox died on my system today and I haven't been able to get it working since.

Just freezes after start up, even in safe mode (well, when it even booted up, which it stopped doing after a couple tries).

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#15
post #4

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

No. They already have the lowest memory footprint. They don't need to figure out that they need to fix memory leaks, since they are doing it with great success.

But it will help them identify and fix current and future leaks.

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#16
post #10
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fact that there are both native and Firebug developer tools still baffles me- if they'd concentrated on one of the two they might be a lot more competitive with Chrome.

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#17

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

Curious to see this today, as the FF enterprise mailing list has been filled with grumbling this week about FF's inability to auto-update itself or its plugins, and the headaches that causes us IT folk when paired with the auto-quarantining of outdated plugins recently implemented.

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#18

Funnily enough, Firefox died on my system today and I haven't been able to get it working since. Just freezes after start up, even in safe mode (well, when it even booted up, which it stopped doing after a couple tries).

On my computer it sometimes doesn't open a window unless I open a second instance of Firefox, and then both suddenly load. Try that maybe?

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#19

Funnily enough, Firefox died on my system today and I haven't been able to get it working since. Just freezes after start up, even in safe mode (well, when it even booted up, which it stopped doing after a couple tries).

Your sqlite files might be locked - try either removing or moving them and copying them back.

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#20
post #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.

Glad you mentioned about:memory. I usually read the changelog when they push out a release but somehow I missed that. This is a very nice breakdown of the memory.
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