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Firefox fixes save gigabytes of memory on image-heavy pages

blog.mozilla.org

21–30 of 203 posts

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

#21

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…

I imagine it's good for image heavy sites like Pinterest or Tumblr.

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

#22

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…

With the capbility being built, if there is a performance tradeoff (I didnt look through the bugs, but imagine it was already thought about), then its now possible to do 'hey you have a load of spare memory' pre decode all the things type optimisations

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

#23

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…

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink has some reasons. One reason is explicitly "Fewer people will complain that Firefox is a memory hog and that Mozilla ignores memory usage". Even if complaints are technically nonsense, addressing complaints is still important.

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

#26

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…

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?

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

#27
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'd really like to run an extra VM for development as opposed to letting my browser gobble it all up.

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

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, selectively targeting (bad) cells in a heavily complex system (physiology) that you didn't design and have limited access to makes it tough. Implementing these fixes in FF is easy. They didn't even have to be geniuses to realize it, just keeping an eye on friends (/rivals) would have given them the idea a few years ago. NB: Not criticizing FF devs. They do awesome work! And sometimes, such silly little optimi…

The idea of fixing them is easy, the practicalities are clearly not - take a look at the size of the bug reports and patches that go with them...

I agree it is tricky. But not as bad as curing cancer, by far.

Practically, cancer cannot be cured even by multiples of all the effort than went into those two bugs.

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

#29

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?

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.

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

#30

Great news! Many thanks to Timothy Nikkel and all the other Mozilla devs. It's particularly great on Fennec, where the memory constraint is noticeable. For people - like me - who didn't know what B2G was, it's Boot2Gecko, the OS project: https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G/FAQ

Check out http://firefox.com/os for a user view of Firefox OS and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS for a Developer view.
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