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Except mobile hardware which does not. Power usage is always a concern.
Power usage has little to do with memory usage. In fact, if the browser is using more RAM as a cache, it won't hit persistent storage as much, which actually increases battery life.
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Maybe I'm misreading things but it looks like it's been constantly getting worse since 2012?
You are misreading given that there were big improvements in memory measurment and some of the memory use increase you notice are just firefox measuring better it's own memory
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> I'm also a little surprised there hasn't been an attempt to launch a completely new Firefox from the ground up. Check out Servo: https://servo.org/
As a fully rewritten browser engine, how will they handle malformed HTML? Will it, like other browsers, try to 'understand' and fix some errors or will it stick to the specification?
I've got 732 tabs open at the moment and performance is still fine. The upper limit for my machine seems to be about 745 ish - much beyond that and FF runs out of video memory or something (new tabs render sites half black).
You need to get a better handle on your life.
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Have you given the built-in Firefox dev tools a try? If so, what did you feel was missing?
Really just that I've used Firebug for so long that using anything else is painful . I've tried switching but always ended up going back. Much of it is interface differences, but some of it is actual differences in functionality: if Firebug has something which another inspector does not, then it's super-frustrating. If another inspector has something that Firebug lacks, then I don't even notice. Edit: I should emphas…
https://blog.getfirebug.com/2016/06/07/unifying-firebug-fire...
“We can learn from the competition,” said Dotzler. “The way they implemented multi-process is RAM-intensive, it can get out of hand. We are learning from them and building an architecture that doesn’t eat all your RAM.” That's the money quote here. I've been waiting for this for a long time actually. Every browser I've tried except Firefox just basically eats all my RAM and other app performance (e.g. compiling stuff…
A few years ago if you'd told me FF would be the RAM-sensitive browser, I'd have laughed you off the internet.
Its also one of the most energy efficient on most platforms.. (edge is more efficient on Windows, though it does not take into account that the engine is always running even if another browser is in use)
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And they're still at it, too: https://areweslimyet.com/
Maybe I'm misreading things but it looks like it's been constantly getting worse since 2012?
its good to monitor and ensure that stays within acceptable parameters though, and potentially improved upon again. at least the gain is pretty slow since they "fixed all the stuff"
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Can someone describe what the "architecture that doesn't eat all your RAM" here is? Is it possible that it will inadvertently provide weaker security protections between tabs than the more naive and RAM-intensive architecture?
a) your security should not rely on process isolation. the javascript engine etc. should be secure in the first place. if you can break out of the JS sandbox you can already attack addon scripts (think password managers) b) hosting some tabs in the same, sandboxed process is still stronger than hosting all of them in the parent process.
that said i think firefox's choice is more sensible.
At some point it became very usable and it still is today. HOWEVER while the interface is, yes, much more responsive, it is also NOTICEABLY slower.
I ended up reverting recently and I'm using single process Firefox right now. Its fast even thus from time to time the UI may block if there's heavy stuff going on.
Whatever makes e10s slow they gotta fix it... I suspect there's a lot of synchronization code.
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A few years ago if you'd told me FF would be the RAM-sensitive browser, I'd have laughed you off the internet.
honestly its been years now that FF is one of - if not the - browser which uses the least amount of RAM. Its also one of the most energy efficient on most platforms.. (edge is more efficient on Windows, though it does not take into account that the engine is always running even if another browser is in use)
I've been tracking lots of programs with powertop, including many browsers, in the quest of an efficient desktop and Firefox is pretty good.
I also appreciate its great plugins. With vimperator I can configure Firefox using a dotfile, and setup lots of neat things like:
1. A ssh proxy mode that also routes DNS queries
set! network.proxy.socks=localhost
set! network.proxy.socks_port=8888
set! network.proxy.socks_remote_dns=true
command -nargs=1 proxy set! network.proxy.type=
2. Site-specific Google searches, with autocomplete for the site URL
command -nargs=+ -complete=url site open google site:
map s :site
All this is really neat functionality, and very simple to achieve. I am waiting for good per-tab sandboxing, but in the meanwhile I have aliased firefox to /usr/bin/firejail so the whole application is sandboxed.
Apologies for the offtopic, but it's really exciting how a program that seemed to have lost development momentum is becoming really great again. Quite close to being the emacs of browsers if you ask me, with so many features and scriptability. Paradoxically you can get best access to these features with a plugin that tries to emulate vi, but you get the idea!