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Firefox fixes save gigabytes of memory on image-heavy pages

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox fixes save gigabytes of memory on image-heavy pages

#101
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A URL should contain all of the state needed. If it doesn't then it's a poorly designed website.

Firefox has to work with the internet as it is, not the internet as we wish it were.

So do users. Keeping several dozen tabs open indefinitely decreases the stability of every browser. Computers have resource limitations. 95% of websites have bookmarkable links; use them.

Re: Firefox fixes save gigabytes of memory on image-heavy pages

#102
post #94
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I tried Firefox, pretty recently, it still needed to address some serious issues, when compared to Chrome: * Unresponsiveness due to one tab thrashing * Bad use of screen-space (bookmarks always visible, cannot disappear titlebar like in Chrome [there's only a Windows extension for that], menu-bar takes up another bar of space by default) * Launching firefox has stop-the-world behavior to check/update extensions…

I too wish it had split processes (although I haven't had a freeze in months), but other than that it beats Chrome in every single way. I am not affected by your UI problems, and I install extensions every other week so I'm not bothered. So, yeah, I guess you didn't really try. Perhaps you're just attached to Chrome.

Maybe multi-process is the reason... I've recently started using Chrome more on my sub-notebook because Firefox gets really choppy even though it has lower memory usage. Perhaps the explanation is Chrome can be scheduled to all four of my 1GHz CPU cores, as compared to Firefox which will be on just one?

Re: Firefox fixes save gigabytes of memory on image-heavy pages

#103
post #65
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a huge advance for those of us who usually have 50-60 tabs open for weeks at a time, where hitting a really heavy image page would tip Firefox over the top and crash it. I switched from Chrome to Firefox a couple of months ago for its ability to handle more tabs without slowing/crashing, and for its better performance with image-heavy pages. So, for me, it's not just "who cares?" it's a killer feature.

Tabs are not bookmarks. Use bookmarks.

> Use bookmarks.

Who said he doesn't?

Re: Firefox fixes save gigabytes of memory on image-heavy pages

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If image decoding is asynchronous (don't know - guessing it is already?) and you decode them when they get near to the viewport and not just when they become visible, then it should always be decoded by the time you scroll to it and yet never jank the page. Scrolling a long way really fast probably means there's a small delay while it decodes images, but surely that's worth it to save gigabytes of memory?

> but surely that's worth it to save gigabytes of memory I'm not sure _save_ is the right word here...using available memory has no particular cost to me over not using it. Of course, the _available_ modifier is relevant, so I take your point.

You would be right if Firefox's memory usage was opportunistic, like the OS disk cache. Problem is, Firefox (or any browser for that matter) will tend to bloat in memory as it sees fit, which for any device with 4GB or less of RAM may mean swapping to disk, which is still the same killer as it always has been.

4GB seems to be the threshhold right now. Windows consumes maybe 0.5-1GB, budget 0.5-1GB for a handful of other programs, bloat Firefox up to 1-1.5GB, and suddenly you're swapping. (Naturally the OS does not wait right up until you have 4GB of RAM consumed to start swapping, it seems to start around 3GB)

Re: Firefox fixes save gigabytes of memory on image-heavy pages

#105
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the problem is that the bookmark UI design is broken.

My bookmark UI isn't broken: putting tree-style tabs in a sidebar is perfect.

If they would make the tree-style tabs very aggressively swap to disk, or even discard state entirely and seamlessly become a bookmark that would reload when clicked (perhaps this behavior could work only for white-listed domains, like wikipedia.org), that would be perfect.

The main usability problem with bookmarks over tabs AFAIC is that the bookmark UI does not encourage pruning bookmarks, so most become stale over time.

Another idea I've been kicking around for a while is "tab decay". Have tabs start to decay and close themselves after not being viewed for a configurable amount of time. 1 month would probably do it for me, it would save me a lot of cleanup time.

Re: Firefox fixes save gigabytes of memory on image-heavy pages

#106
post #36
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends how you use it: e.g. I normally have many many tabs open, and Firefox handles that much better on my system than Chromium.

really? I have about 20 tabs open on Chrome now with no lag, with one tab open in Firefox my whole system grinds to a halt.

I am addicted to tabs and have 260 tabs (yes, I have a problem) open and running smoothly in Firefox. That was not possible in Chromium last time I used it.

Firefox currently uses about 3GB memory, which means I have plenty of memory left on my computer. So I do not think memory usage in the general case is so bad for Firefox and neither is scalability or performance. The problem Firefox historically has had and still to a degree has is lack of responsiveness.

Re: Firefox fixes save gigabytes of memory on image-heavy pages

#107

Is it time to switch back to Firefox from Chrome? I remember when I originally switched around Firefox 3.5.x Chrome was much leaner and faster. Has the pendulum finally swung back the other way?

Absolutely. The only thing I miss from Chrome is the clever indicator in the scrollbar when searching on the page. The only thing.

Re: Firefox fixes save gigabytes of memory on image-heavy pages

#108

Like many of the other Firefox memory changes, this one leaves me feeling a little ambiguous. On the one hand, obviously keeping memory usage down is good. On the other hand, waiting to decompress/decode images until they are visible to the user means that there are obviously going to be performance trade-offs (and also, obviously, design/engineering trade-offs). Speaking just from my personal usage: I don't think th…

We've been using stuff like Infinity.js ( http://airbnb.github.io/infinity/ ) for quite a while now, and it's basic functionality is to improve long scrolling panes by dynamically adding and removing elements (including images) in real time as you scroll to keep the number of elements low and the page responsive. Sites that use this technique usually feel just as responsive as if the site really did have a page with…

I don't know that I'd characterize this as a workaround. Infinity.js is definitely a good approach, but you should expect good baseline performance from the browser even without more complicated techniques.

Re: Firefox fixes save gigabytes of memory on image-heavy pages

#109
post #49

Is it time to switch back to Firefox from Chrome? I remember when I originally switched around Firefox 3.5.x Chrome was much leaner and faster. Has the pendulum finally swung back the other way?

Firefox will never ask you to sign-in for the best browsing experience like chrome does. That's when I switched back. You can tell google is an ad company and users are secondary by their default choice of 3rd party cookies. I'd rather not have an ad company developing my browser. The incentives are all wrong.

While Firefox isn't an ad company, don't they get most of their revenues from Google's placement as the default search engine in Firefox?

Re: Firefox fixes save gigabytes of memory on image-heavy pages

#110
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the problem is that the bookmark UI design is broken.

My bookmark UI isn't broken: putting tree-style tabs in a sidebar is perfect.

I'm saying that the description recommends using tabs in place of bookmarks because the bookmark UI is suboptimal.
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