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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

#121

Post by antimatter »

jimmaswell wrote: post #79
Peaker wrote: 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…

Firefox's UI is the most customizable of any browser that I know of. You can really make it into almost anything you want. My example: http://i.imgur.com/aMgQBgW.png very clean and functional.

This is great. Mind sharing any extensions used?

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

#122

Post by ChickeNES »

mytrash wrote: post #74
Peaker wrote: 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…

Note: http://i.imgur.com/DVWCxty.png Tree style tab. and Nav on title bar. Lots of vertical pixels available.

Oh my fucking god, where can I get this?

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

#123

Post by mindcrime »

Lagged2Death wrote: post #78
mnarayan01 wrote: post #19

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…

...it seems ... as if Mozilla went from being totally dismissive of memory complaints to being hyper-responsive to memory complaints with no (publicly stated) rationale behind the change. I don't know what their internal rationale is. "Memory is cheap," we like to say, but it's really only true if you're not wasting it like crazy all the time. Ten years ago you could surf the web with 512MB of RAM; now we're getting…

Right. Also, no matter how cheap memory is, you run into limits of things like maximum RAM capacity. I'm there now... I have 8GB of RAM in this laptop, and that's all it can hold. I can't spend more money to put more RAM in here even if I want too, as it just won't take it. I'd love to go up to 16GB, but that won't happen until I buy a whole new machine.

Needless to say, I'm very happy about this firefox news. AS somebody who routinely runs a lot of apps (and more than a few memory hungry ones) I want every app to be a freaking memory frugal as it possibly can, and be a good citizen when RAM has to be shared between apps.

Playing the whole "Unused RAM is wasted, take up as much RAM as you can" mindset is fine if you only run one app at a time, but, really, who the f%!# actually does that???

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

#124

Post by cldr »

meowface wrote: post #119
uladzislau wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome became very resource hungry and poor at memory management recently. Sometimes I see half blank pages when scrolling which I've never seen before on the desktop.

Yep. In fact, I've noticed performance appearing to get worse and worse in both my Canary browser and regular Chrome. Canary always seems to perform quite a bit worse than regular Chrome. Not sure if that's just due to bugs because of the unstable build, or further changes they're making that is continuously hurting performance.

It also could be that they're making changes and just not optimizing them until they put them in regular Chrome.

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

#125

Post by CrazedGeek »

ChickeNES wrote: post #122
mytrash wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note: http://i.imgur.com/DVWCxty.png Tree style tab. and Nav on title bar. Lots of vertical pixels available.

Oh my fucking god, where can I get this?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

You can move the nav buttons yourself: right click on a toolbar -> Customize.

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

#126

Post by azakai »

bluecalm wrote: post #86
Peaker wrote: 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…

>Unresponsiveness due to one tab thrashing Or even not trashing. When one tab asks for username/login with a pop-up ("Authentication Required" one) and you have it saved in some email opened in another tab you can't switch to email tab until you kill the login one. I call it "god window" (god tab in this case) pattern. Very typical for most old and some new Windows desktop apps. Chrome handles it perfectly.

Ironically, the reverse is true for alert() popups.

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

#127

Post by zobzu »

aktau wrote: post #27
spyder wrote: post #20

I just compared it with Chrome using the example page mentioned in article: In Firefox Nightly at the initial page load it uses around 250 MB memory and with scrolling it stays around that. In Chrome (in Canary too) initial it uses around 300 MB but scrolling keeps filling the memory indefinitely (I stopped scrolling above 1.2GB)

Yea, I also noticed that, save for the pages with tons of images, firefox has actually been better than chrome in that respect for the last few releases. Now with this fix, I'm seriously thinking of jumping back. Then I'll finally have my sweet DownThemAll again. Many kudos to the firefox devs, performance and memory-usage is very important, and it seems they realized that before it was too late. Even with my 16GB I'…

im using windows and the regular firefox (so it doesnt have this fix) and i notice that chromium always scrolls a lot slower than firefox anyway. which annoys me hehe.

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

#128

Post by gamache »

aktau wrote: post #81
patrickaljord wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't 16GB enough to run an extra VM for dev? also, try docker.

Not when most of that 16GB is in use. At the moment, chrome is using up 3.4GB. Yea, I have a lot of tabs open. Yes, I should work on that. Yes, I'd also like being able to open that many tabs and have my browser perhaps release some of that memory and just reclaim it when I open the tab for reading again. Docker is real nice, although I might go for pure LXC the nex time I build something. But I'm developing on OSX (…

I'd also like being able to open that many tabs and have my browser perhaps release some of that memory and just reclaim it when I open the tab for reading again.

Chromebooks do a great job of this -- inactive tabs are often freed when memory is needed elsewhere, and reloaded as necessary. I wonder if that feature is going to come to Chrome outside of ChromeOS.

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

#129

Post by Zr40 »

uladzislau wrote: post #63
spyder wrote: post #20

I just compared it with Chrome using the example page mentioned in article: In Firefox Nightly at the initial page load it uses around 250 MB memory and with scrolling it stays around that. In Chrome (in Canary too) initial it uses around 300 MB but scrolling keeps filling the memory indefinitely (I stopped scrolling above 1.2GB)

Chrome became very resource hungry and poor at memory management recently. Sometimes I see half blank pages when scrolling which I've never seen before on the desktop.

The half-blank pages you're seeing is a feature that's recently been enabled. This is a case of latency improvement that visually appears to be worse.

When rendering can't keep up with your rate of scrolling, Chrome will display the part that has been rendered so far and display a checkerboard pattern for the not yet rendered part. Previously, Chrome would just flip the display buffers less often if rendering can't keep up.

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

#130

Post by drivebyacct2 »

reidmain wrote: post #25

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?

I switched. Chrome is still significantly faster in Linux though (startup and rendering and general browser responsiveness [switching tabs, etc]) And yes, I test regularly with Aurora and Nightly.
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