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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

#151

Post by ahoge »

Peaker wrote: post #143
ahoge wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't really use bookmarks myself. Well, you could always just use Alt -> Bookmarks, right?

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

#152

Post by vectorjohn »

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.

This has been a myth floating around since the early days of Chrome. I am and have for a long time been a big fan of Chrome, but it has never been light weight. It's just fast so people think of it that way. But you've always been able to check on the memory usage of tabs and see it just eating up your memory.

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

#153

Post by Peaker »

devcpp wrote: post #94
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…

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.

How do you get rid of Firefox's windows decorations in Linux? All I could find was for Windows, except one gnome-based extension which is known not to work reliably.

Also, checking for updates when I start my browser is the worst possible time UI-wise. I start my browser when the site I want to visit is at my fingertips, and my working memory is fading as I am waiting for my computer. How do you customize this away?

Sure, the bookmarks bar being always-visible or never-visible is a minor defect, but it is still worse than Chrome's show-in-new-tabs behavior. Showing menu bars and window decorations by default shows bad judgement, but indeed that wasn't the reason I couldn't stay with Firefox. It felt slower, had annoying wasteful window decorations, started with annoying extension version checks, and let bad web apps interfere with all my tabs.

Do you have actual responses for my actual points besides "you didn't really try"?

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

#154

Post by ritonlajoie »

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…

if you are running one docker per VM, you are probably doing something wrong :)

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

#155

Post by tikhonj »

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…

Firefox's screen usage is easy to configure. Compare[1] my KDE-themed Firefox and Chrome, for example.

[1]: http://jelv.is/browser-screen-usage.png

Extensions require a restart to be installed, perhaps, but that doesn't seem to be a big issue: you only install any given extension once. If you want to install a bunch at the same time, you only need to restart once.

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

#156

Post by riquito »

cldr wrote: post #124
meowface wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But spyder said that he tested on Canary too

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

#157

Post by riquito »

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?

Do they ever make decisions just to help Google?

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

#158

Post by staktrace »

jordanthoms wrote: post #134
gamache wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And Firefox for Android.

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

#159

Post by velodrome »

vectorjohn wrote: post #152
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.

This has been a myth floating around since the early days of Chrome. I am and have for a long time been a big fan of Chrome, but it has never been light weight. It's just fast so people think of it that way. But you've always been able to check on the memory usage of tabs and see it just eating up your memory.

I agree. Chrome has NEVER been lightweight in terms of memory. Each tab is in its own sandbox environment. It will need to load resources separately for each sandbox and that chews up memory.

Chrome may be inefficient with memory but I could manage this by closing the tab. Firefox would retain the memory even after the tab has been closed for some time.

Firefox is a lot better these days.

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

#160

Post by abrowne »

tikhonj wrote: post #155
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 screen usage is easy to configure. Compare[1] my KDE-themed Firefox and Chrome, for example. [1]: http://jelv.is/browser-screen-usage.png Extensions require a restart to be installed, perhaps, but that doesn't seem to be a big issue: you only install any given extension once. If you want to install a bunch at the same time, you only need to restart once.

Are those window controls (close, etc) drawn by kwin or firefox/extension?
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