Firefox fixes save gigabytes of memory on image-heavy pages • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by darkarmani » Tue, Oct 01, 2013, 9:17 PM UTC

darkarmani wrote: post #91

patrickaljord wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Did docker add Windows and Darwin support already? Wow, they are really moving fast.

The joke being that Docker requires LXC and aufs, which means you are stuck running Ubuntu for now. Fedora is soon going to announce Docker support when 0.7 is released.

For now if you want to run docker on your Mac, the best bet is to use Vagrant + virtualbox (or fusion if you have the provider). This means you have to run another VM to run docker which defeats the purpose of the suggestion of running Docker, so you don't have to run another VM instance.

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

#132

Post by toki5 » Tue, Oct 01, 2013, 9:20 PM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #59

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 never saw a reason to switch to Chrome to begin with. Performance was acceptable for me, while other benefits always made Firefox more useful (privacy with encrypted Sync, better add-ons and etc.). And some time ago, Firefox clearly became a leader in performance as well. All this "jumping to Chrome" was simply a hype thing IMHO, and I generally don't care about hype.

"Reasons that don't necessarily apply to me," while fair, do not fall under "hype."

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

#133

Post by jmathai » Tue, Oct 01, 2013, 9:25 PM UTC

swang wrote: post #109

snarfy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They can accept the revenue from Google without compromising their integrity to the user.

If it wasn't Google then it'd be Microsoft. Doesn't really matter besides the fact that it helps them fund the development of their initiatives.

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

#134

Post by jordanthoms » Tue, Oct 01, 2013, 9:25 PM UTC

gamache wrote: post #128

aktau wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's also done on Chrome for Android.

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

#135

Post by wodenokoto » Tue, Oct 01, 2013, 9:28 PM UTC

Peaker wrote: post #68

aktau wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

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…

Bookmarks bar is hidden by default. Don't complain about your own customization.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/?utm_source=firefox...

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

#136

Post by shmerl » Tue, Oct 01, 2013, 9:34 PM UTC

toki5 wrote: post #132

shmerl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never saw a reason to switch to Chrome to begin with. Performance was acceptable for me, while other benefits always made Firefox more useful (privacy with encrypted Sync, better add-ons and etc.). And some time ago, Firefox clearly became a leader in performance as well. All this "jumping to Chrome" was simply a hype thing IMHO, and I generally don't care about hype.

"Reasons that don't necessarily apply to me," while fair, do not fall under "hype."

There was a lot of hype about it.

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

#137

Post by chestnut-tree » Tue, Oct 01, 2013, 9:41 PM UTC

Completely unscientific test: if I load the following website in Firefox 24 (on Windows 8), the page scrolls very sluggishly (as it did in previous Firefox versions). The same page scrolls fine in Chrome. I don't know what is causing the difference. Is it the images? Or something else? For info, Firefox is my main web browser and I have never switched to Chrome (nor do I intend to).

Warning - the website is ridiculously image heavy (it's a gallery of Android app screenshots)

http://androidniceties.tumblr.com/

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

#138

Post by ahoge » Tue, Oct 01, 2013, 9:48 PM UTC

Peaker wrote: post #68

aktau wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

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…

> Bad use of screen-space

Slightly customized Firefox 24: 54 [1]

Chrome 31: 61

IE10: 55 [2]

Opera 12: 61

[1] http://i.imgur.com/eBiIZHc.png (Also, no close button on tabs and they shrink down to the size of pinned tabs. All other browsers do that shrinking stuff by default. There used to be a property for that, but one developer decided to remove it. Now you need a custom userChrome.css and other voodoo.)

[2] Sounds close, but 50% of that space are actually unused. There is a lot less room for tabs.

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

#139

Post by ahoge » Tue, Oct 01, 2013, 9:54 PM UTC

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.

If you close your tabs via mmb or Ctrl+W, you can remove all those close buttons, too.

browser.tabs.closeButtons;2

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

#140

Post by trustfundbaby » Tue, Oct 01, 2013, 10:08 PM UTC

If Firefox would find a way to let Chrome extensions work in Firefox, that would definitely make it a little easier to switch back and forth, definitely going to try this out though.