Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox fixes save gigabytes of memory on image-heavy pages

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 203 posts

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

#141

Post by outworlder »

darkarmani wrote: post #131
darkarmani wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes.

But then, you can run a single VM with any number of Docker containers inside. Depending on what you are doing, that could be a win.

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

#142

Post by nnethercote »

adamtulinius wrote: post #5

I wish people would use regular 2d plots for 2d data. Other than that, great news!

Everyone's crapping on me for the choice of graph. I originally tried a 2d plot but the lines obscured each other.

More importantly, it wasn't intended to be a rigorous data representation because the results vary significantly between runs. I was just trying to communicate the results in an approximate fashion; the improvements are dramatic enough that approximate is good enough, IMO.

And in case anyone is thinking about suggesting errors bars: please don't.

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

#143

Post by Peaker »

ahoge wrote: post #138
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…

> 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…

The customizations that allow disappearing the window decorations work only on Windows, as far as I could find.

Also, Firefox requires losing the bookmarks tab completely, whereas Chrome has a saner default of having it appear in new/empty tabs.

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

#144

Post by Peaker »

viraptor wrote: post #70
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…

> bookmarks always visible, View -> toolbars -> bookmarks toolbar (uncheck) > menu-bar takes up another bar of space by default View -> toolbars -> menu bar (uncheck)

But that means my bookmarks disappear completely, whereas in Chrome they are displayed in new tabs, which is far more useful behavior.

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

#145

Post by nnethercote »

dragonwriter wrote: post #82
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…

> All in all, it seems (from a not-particularly-in-touch outsider perspective) 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 suspect that being a company that wants to have a unified code base for their browser and that is now newly pushing a browser-centric OS for smartphones may explain th…

I first started working on improving memory consumption in early 2011, and that evolved into the MemShrink project (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink) a couple of months after that. Firefox OS came later.

In fact, it's fortunate that MemShrink had been up and running for a while because it meant we had already fixed a lot of leaks and inefficiencies, and we had good tools for identifying memory problems in Firefox OS.

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

#146

Post by Peaker »

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.

I couldn't find any customization that removed window decorations in Linux. I found ones for Windows only.

Also, I got the (subjective) feeling that Firefox was becoming sluggish as I had 6-7 addons. I might be wrong, but that would mean Firefox is sluggish in general.

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

#147

Post by nnethercote »

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…

Have you tried the new version? You should try it before you dismiss it due to theoretical concerns. As I wrote in the blog post, the time before the page displayed dropped from 5 seconds to 1 seconds. And scrolling performance is unaffected AFAIK; if you have evidence otherwise Timothy and I would love to hear about it.

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

#148

Post by nnethercote »

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?

Try it! It's not hard. And if you do, please reset your profile first: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi.... Lots of old Firefox profiles have problems that can hurt performance, and resetting can make a big difference.

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

#149

Post by Peaker »

wodenokoto wrote: post #135
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…

Bookmarks bar is hidden by default. Don't complain about your own customization. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/?utm_source=firefox...

Correct, however:

1) Chrome's behavior where you get bookmarks bar in new tabs is far more useful.

2) Even without the bookmarks' bar, I have 4 bars (window decorations, menu bar, tab bar, URL bar), whereas Chrome has 2 (tab bar + window decorations, URL bar).

Screen-space is still wasted compared to Chrome, and you don't get bookmarks in new tabs.

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

#150

Post by nnethercote »

neurostimulant wrote: post #17

> When loading the page, physical memory consumption would still jump to almost 3 GB, because the images are still decoded. But it would soon drop down to a few hundred MB, as the decoded data for non-visible images was discarded, and stay there (with some minor variations) while scrolling around the page. This is a great news. The application that uses the most memory on my machine is the web browser. I wonder if th…

> I wonder if this fix would make scrolling the page less smooth.

It shouldn't. But why don't you try it?

Post reply on HN