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Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

jasonlefkowitz.net

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Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#61

Post by mpk »

azakai wrote: post #38

> Firefox, on Linux at least, is busted. It’s busted so bad that it’s painful to use. And it’s been this way ever since Firefox 3 launched — three years ago. This is an odd statement, considering that many Firefox devs run Linux. I'm running Firefox on Linux right now, and it works great. I guess the author of the article is hitting a specific bug. It isn't a general issue that affects all users of Firefox on Linux.

I run FF on linux for dev work (not on FF itself, but for JS heavy web apps). Actually, I run a whole bunch of different FF versions with different profiles for testing a huge variety of things.

My main gripe is that some of the extensions (NoScript, Firebug and friends) sometimes break things, hog the CPU in one way or another or just plain eat up the heap.

I am fine with this. These are extensions, after all and it's for dev stuff, which I judge by a slightly different standard than 'normal user' stuff.

The latest FF releases especially make me happy because they're adding modern web features and working on UX and performance. And it shows and feels.

I don't care about bookmarks because I don't bother storing those in the browser anymore. Was the choice for storing 'stuff' in SQLite a good one? Yes of course it was. It's the best cross-platform way to store structured data on disk, which is why everybody and his/her dog has made the same choice. Are there inefficient ways in which it is being used? Maybe. Probably? I haven't looked into this, but this is hardly an insurmountable problem.

Sure it felt like FF was lagging behind once the WebKit browsers started coming out (with better JS engines) but the Mozilla Team is back in the game with its new release cycles and updates.

And this makes me very happy.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#62

Post by codexon »

I noticed this problem in Windows along with huge memory leaks.

I've switched to Firefox Nightly and this lag seems to have gone away.

As a bonus, the browser feels as fast as Chrome and it takes several weeks more usage before needing a restart due to slowness.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#64

Post by CWuestefeld »

weaksauce wrote: post #35
jamesgeck0 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long ago was this? There's been a number of memory usage improvements since 3.5. I had 40 tabs open for the better part of last week and didn't notice a performance hit; and I've only got 2Gb RAM.

I have the latest version and my long running high count tab sessions slow down my system tremendously. OSX 8GB RAM.

I have memory-hemorrhaging problems under various versions of Windows as well. I need to restart at least once a day (I typically have ~8 tabs in use).

But the clincher that made me switch to Chrome a couple weeks ago was that every couple of hours it would decide of its own accord to tear off a tab into a new window, and then hang. This solved the memory leakage, but not in a useful way.

I'm pretty sure that my problems are related to badly-behaving addins. But Firefox doesn't provide any good way to troubleshoot addins (compare to Chrome), and it seemed to me that the process to track down the culprit given that the problem is nondeterministic and takes a couple of hours to manifest would be more difficult than the switch to Chrome.

That said, I'm having some compatibility problems with Chrome. Like, last night the CAPTCHA in the free annual credit report site wouldn't work.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#65

Post by dhimes »

mpk wrote: post #61
azakai wrote: post #38

> Firefox, on Linux at least, is busted. It’s busted so bad that it’s painful to use. And it’s been this way ever since Firefox 3 launched — three years ago. This is an odd statement, considering that many Firefox devs run Linux. I'm running Firefox on Linux right now, and it works great. I guess the author of the article is hitting a specific bug. It isn't a general issue that affects all users of Firefox on Linux.

I run FF on linux for dev work (not on FF itself, but for JS heavy web apps). Actually, I run a whole bunch of different FF versions with different profiles for testing a huge variety of things. My main gripe is that some of the extensions (NoScript, Firebug and friends) sometimes break things, hog the CPU in one way or another or just plain eat up the heap. I am fine with this. These are extensions, after all and it…

Has Chrome implemented mathML yet? I user firefox for that.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#66

Post by sbierwagen »

joshuacc wrote: post #46
muuh-gnu wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but why's it such a big deal? Because people copy&paste URLs all the time, and without the http:// they dont work where pasted. Not having http:// when youre copy-pasting feels like a part of your URL is missing. What I dont know is for whom they are hiding http:// ? I'd guess there are 2 types of users, those who need the URL, then they need it complete, including the http:// , and those who dont need the URL to b…

Lack of a superfluous http:// is one of the things that I love about Chrome. And, for the record, it is included when you copy from the URL bar in every version I've seen on Windows.

Unless you got the URL from the history search, but didn't actually visit the page. In that case, it omits the http://

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#67

Post by cookiecaper »

I used Chromium on Linux for 2+ years and switched back to Firefox during the 4.0 beta cycle. I'm much happier with Firefox's extensibility and interface and I haven't had any major issues since going back. The main reason I used Chrome was because it was so much faster in terms of WebGL and JS execution, but now that Firefox is regularly improving and competitive, I am much happier with the experience.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#68

Post by johnconroy »

On my Win7 install FireFox is incredibly slow to start up and somewhat prone to crash (its FF7)... to my mind it's usable, but far inferior to Chrome, to which I switched about 3 months ago.

Just as I type this I realise that MAYBE I've got a few dead extensions in my FF (and have far more extensions installed ). Still though: Chrome all the way for me... except for some reason it won't play a couple old flash games I like

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#69

Post by rorrr »

cookiecaper wrote: post #67

I used Chromium on Linux for 2+ years and switched back to Firefox during the 4.0 beta cycle. I'm much happier with Firefox's extensibility and interface and I haven't had any major issues since going back. The main reason I used Chrome was because it was so much faster in terms of WebGL and JS execution, but now that Firefox is regularly improving and competitive, I am much happier with the experience.

I had to switch to FF 7 (clean install, no addons) for one full day yesterday, and it feels so much slower than Chrome.

I used to be a huge FF advocate, until Chrome arrived. At first I stayed on FF and tried Chrome a couple of times. It lacked AdBlock back then, so I didn't switch immediately. There's no way I'm going back to FF now.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#70

Post by tytso »

The fundamental problem with Mozilla is that it is trying to do database queries in its UI loop, and it wants every single piece of state safely on disk after every single click. This results in a huge amount of disk space to get written to disk as you visit every single click. Now I don't know about you, but if my computer crashes, do I really care if everything up to the last click is safely on disk? I wouldn't care at all if the last 10 or 15 minutes of browser history; I don't care if the link colors are a little off due to a some history getting lost on a system crash.

Compounding this is the fact that SQLlite was never intended to be a high performance database. It was designed for portability, and ease of setup. Which is fine, but it means that SQLlite uses many more I/O's and issues many more fsync()'s than would be strictly necessary. (In fact, Oracle doesn't issue a single fsync operation on a transaction commit; it uses direct I/O instead.)

So even if Firefox manages to get rid of all of the various problems that cause its UI thread to block, this fundamental design mistake will cause them to do excess I/O's, which burns battery and burns SSD write cycles. They would be much better off if they kept all of their state in memory, and 10-15 minutes, updated the on-disk database in a completely asynchronous fashion.

And if that means losing some history on a crash, is the fact that a user has visited one web site, but not another, really that important?

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