261–270 of 346 posts
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Maybe I'm misreading things but it looks like it's been constantly getting worse since 2012?
They're getting worse at a linear pace, while hardware improves exponentially. Effectively that's a pretty good improvement each year.
Its incredible multi-process took this long. Just goes to show you that your architecture decisions last a long time and are often difficult to change. Chrome had this from day one and never had a big and old codebase to worry about. Yet it took Firefox many years to get multi-process going and my understanding is that its much more limited and simpler than what Chrome or Edge do. I'm also a little surprised there ha…
|| I'm also a little surprised there hasn't been an attempt to launch a completely new Firefox from the ground up. I (hopefully) think this is what Servo is and will end up being. Has no legacy code, and is tiny in comparison to Gecko. It's OS support is fairly modern, and has no interest in supporting Windows XP. It's also written in such a way that allows them to be more multi-threaded and more concurrent than trad…
Not really the plan. Servo may eventually become a product, but that would be in the very far future. But Gecko can use lessons learned from Servo, and try to share code with it, so you can incrementally replace parts of Gecko.
> and has no interest in supporting Windows XP.
I don't think that's the case? We don't have users on XP so we may not support it right now, but that's just an issue of priorities and not having the resources to fix all the things at once.
There are more XP users of Firefox than there are on Linux (probably for other browsers too). If Servo was a product it would probably care about XP.
“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…
The thing is, workstation and laptop RAM is so cheap. If your browser is eating an appreciable chunk of your 16 or 32GB of RAM, you need to close some tabs.
Why so much RAM? I thought the OS could share pages across processes...
This thread seems to be the latter, my experience is the former. If you see bad performance/memory usage with a small number of tabs, are you sure that it's not due to bad plugins?
I think about:memory and about:performance could be helpful. I seem to recall they used to have some reporting on known problem plugins (perhaps as part of https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/plugincheck/).
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My hardware doesn't improve exponentially. In fact, my current work laptop has less memory (8G) than my previous one (16G) or previous desktop machine (also 16G). And it mostly works with Chrome, but I stopped using Firefox because my habit of opening dozens of tabs led to stratospheric memory usages that killed even 16G machines. That was somewhere in 2013, looks like it's even worse now?
> I stopped using Firefox because my habit of opening dozens of tabs led to stratospheric memory usages that killed even 16G machines I don't think that's representative of how Firefox works. I used Firefox similarly in 2013 and didn't see those problems; the users supported by my company, mostly on 4GB machines, also didn't see them. I have a 112 tabs open right now and Firefox has been running for a couple of weeks…
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The main reason tabs aren't saved to disk isn't a concern about responsiveness, it is a concern about data loss. You have to be very sure that you restore the state exactly. What if you spent a few hours filling out some government form online, then you went and took a break by watching a few YouTube videos? Memory usage might spike up, and the browser decides to unload the tab with the form. You'd be mad if form sta…
How about detecting the pages that don't have stateful elements, and then only serializing those?
To make this work reliably would be quite difficult.
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I'm at 2.9G virtual 1.277g resident with about 130 tabs open (yeah, I'm a goofball but I like my tabs). It's pretty responsive on a thinkpad x220 i5-2540M @ 2.6ghz, 8G of ram and an SSD.
Not even criticizing, but how do you manage 130 tabs? How do you find tabs you're looking for? You must have some kind of system!
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My hardware doesn't improve exponentially. In fact, my current work laptop has less memory (8G) than my previous one (16G) or previous desktop machine (also 16G). And it mostly works with Chrome, but I stopped using Firefox because my habit of opening dozens of tabs led to stratospheric memory usages that killed even 16G machines. That was somewhere in 2013, looks like it's even worse now?
Firefox has gotten much more stable over recent years in regards to having excessive amounts of tabs open. I can have over 300 tabs open and it's stable (I was using Waterfox when doing this in Windows though).
It only loads the actual tab when you activate it though, so I don't think all the tabs are being stored in memory, just the ones you activate during a session. I probably actually load about 30 or so during a session, with many more being opened, looked at then closed.
Tab Mix Plus FTW!