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Firefox 8.0 is Released

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Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#71

Post by carussell »

eCa wrote: post #27
richbradshaw wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because version numbers are irrelevant, what's important is keeping people on the newest version. "Solving" the problem of large version numbers is like solving the problem 1/0.

At work we have a web application purchased about 18 months ago that officially don't support Firefox above 3.6. There were rendering differences between 3.6 and 4 that were serious enough to enforce that restriction for certain users. Apparently, it has begun working as expected again in FF7 (might have worked in FF6, not sure). The application also uses jQuery 1.2.6 (released May '08) - I guess I'll be the one to Q…

Let's be clear.

"The version number is too high" is one complaint.

"I have compatibility issues across releases" is another. They are not the same. They are not interchangeable.

What happened here perfectly exemplifies what happens every time a release is brought up. One of these complaints is brought up, then in the next breath it's switched to the other, as if we're still discussing the same thing.

We are not.

Conflating the two by bouncing between them multiple times in a discussion, every time the discussion occurs results in massive, unproductive churn.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#72

Post by JoshTriplett »

Ziomislaw wrote: post #61
JoshTriplett wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely a good idea for Windows users, and possibly Macs as well (I don't know the prevalence of browser-infesting software there). On Linux, though, it promptly flagged all of the addons I had installed through the distro packaging system as "third-party addons" and wanted to disable them by default.

so it worked properly on Linux. there is no way to know whether an addon instaled 'for the whole' system was added by third party, or by package. only addons in Your home dir are considered as 'installed by you'

Except that Linux doesn't tend to suffer from the browser-infesting stealth installs common to other platforms; the case of packaged addons seems far more common and likely.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#73

Post by daemin »

getsat wrote: post #50
daemin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it bother you that an application is using so much RAM? Do you only have 2 GB or something like that? I'd prefer that applications used my RAM since unused RAM is just wasted electricity. I find it strange that people still think of RAM as a precious resource that needs to be conserved and under-utilised. I'd rather have it used than have to fetch something from disk or the network.

> I'd prefer that applications used my RAM since unused RAM is just wasted electricity. I... but... er... This is probably the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen on this site. You could write a two line C program that allocates all the memory on your system and then sits in a loop doing nothing, but then you'd be wasting even more electricity because your hdd would be reading/writing to your swap space. :| > I'd ra…

Yes, you could write such a program.

Yes modern OSes do use non-Application RAM for caching, mostly files and other small buffers. While Firefox is probably doing a lot of caching for web content, something that modern OSes don't yet do. Hence I have no qualms about it using over a gig of RAM.

I guess my comment was read more angrily than I meant it to sound. What I mean is let applications use as much RAM as they need and be done with it.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#74

Post by daemin »

nitrogen wrote: post #60
daemin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it bother you that an application is using so much RAM? Do you only have 2 GB or something like that? I'd prefer that applications used my RAM since unused RAM is just wasted electricity. I find it strange that people still think of RAM as a precious resource that needs to be conserved and under-utilised. I'd rather have it used than have to fetch something from disk or the network.

If I have 6GB of RAM and feel like e.g. editing a bunch of very large photos or videos without closing my browser, it's annoying to have that browser using 25% of RAM.

Is it actually using 25% of physical RAM, or just (25% of 6GB) of Virtual Address space (well actually 4GB address space for 32 bit applications/browsers).

Then again do you actually notice a slow down when you try to edit those photos? Have you run benchmarks to see if it's really a problem with RAM usage or if it's some Flash or other plugin that's gobbling up your CPU, hence the slow down.

Does that really matter so much, since if you actually need to use that Physical ram for your editing task the OS should page out physical memory from the browser and other unused applications and make it available for your needs.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#75

Post by nitrogen »

daemin wrote: post #74
nitrogen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I have 6GB of RAM and feel like e.g. editing a bunch of very large photos or videos without closing my browser, it's annoying to have that browser using 25% of RAM.

Is it actually using 25% of physical RAM, or just (25% of 6GB) of Virtual Address space (well actually 4GB address space for 32 bit applications/browsers). Then again do you actually notice a slow down when you try to edit those photos? Have you run benchmarks to see if it's really a problem with RAM usage or if it's some Flash or other plugin that's gobbling up your CPU, hence the slow down. Does that really matter…

It was a hypothetical scenario based on a combination of past experiences. Right now Firefox shows 464M resident (RES column in top) with five tabs open (wait, it's growing, now it's 480M, 486...). After a couple of hours it will be close to 1GB resident.

I've been working on large images in Gimp and Hugin/panotools in the past, and reached a point where swap was being used. The system immediately slowed to an unusable crawl with only a few % of swap in use. Considering that rotating hard drives have a random access throughput of a few MB/s, it's not surprising. These days a swap partition's only use is hibernating. Swap is effectively useless.

One webapp I'm working on triggered a bug in older versions of Chrome that caused it to grow rapidly in size, quickly consuming all of memory. Fortunately that was fixed.

So basically, I'd like to have another GB of image data in RAM before hitting swap (or whatever it is I'm working on), while still having my browser responsive.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#76

Post by Karunamon »

Jach wrote: post #51
Karunamon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an awfully subjective position to take. I don't have a problem with rapid release, but I have a problem with passing off minor revisions and bugfixes as major releases. And try to tell me the version doesn't matter when there's a regression or otherwise something broken on a newer rev that works fine on an older one. I don't know where this recent trend of "version numbers are evil" came from, but it's entirel…

Is it really silly? Gmail doesn't have version numbers. Facebook doesn't have version numbers. Hacker News doesn't have version numbers. Twitter doesn't have version numbers. They may refer to "the new version" or "the new, beta version" but not by number. On the dev side, you might refer to a particular code snapshot with a "version number" that might as well be 3.2 or r304 or "2011-08-3 12:03:47" or d1b119d8f117b16…

>Is it really silly? Gmail doesn't have version numbers. Facebook doesn't have version numbers. Hacker News doesn't have version numbers. Twitter doesn't have version numbers.

Web apps and installed programs are completely different animals.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#77

Post by Karunamon »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #56
Karunamon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering the whole reason they're doing this crap is to make it look like they're keeping up to date with Chrome, yeah, it kinda does make a difference. Methinks they don't understand the concept of "Major release.minor release"

Actually, they understand it quite well; fixes to released versions of Firefox use dotted version numbers like that. Mozilla just switched from doing major releases on a timescale of 1-2 years to doing major releases many times per year. Among other things, that has improved the quality of the browser, since features don't have to rush to meet the release deadline when they can just wait for the next one right around…

But nothing has really changed, except what they refer to each release as.

I've always been a fan of this definition: A minor release contains bugs fixes and minor feature changes (For example, 1.0 to 1.1). Major releases include major functionality and feature enhancements (e.g. 1.x to 2.0).

The problem comes in that they're releasing minor bugfixes and patches as major releases, for no other reason than to compete on the numbers system.

I don't think the answer is "abolish the numbers", I think the answer is "be honest".

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#78

Post by daemin »

nitrogen wrote: post #75
daemin wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it actually using 25% of physical RAM, or just (25% of 6GB) of Virtual Address space (well actually 4GB address space for 32 bit applications/browsers). Then again do you actually notice a slow down when you try to edit those photos? Have you run benchmarks to see if it's really a problem with RAM usage or if it's some Flash or other plugin that's gobbling up your CPU, hence the slow down. Does that really matter…

It was a hypothetical scenario based on a combination of past experiences. Right now Firefox shows 464M resident (RES column in top) with five tabs open (wait, it's growing, now it's 480M, 486...). After a couple of hours it will be close to 1GB resident. I've been working on large images in Gimp and Hugin/panotools in the past, and reached a point where swap was being used. The system immediately slowed to an unusab…

I've had Firefox (versions 3 onwards) running for weeks at a time and only ever had it using between 400-500MB of RAM.

Another thing to check would be what kind of ad ons you had installed, since I would imagine that they could have quite a significant impact on memory usage and performance.

Re: Firefox 8.0 is Released

#79

Post by Ziomislaw »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #72
Ziomislaw wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so it worked properly on Linux. there is no way to know whether an addon instaled 'for the whole' system was added by third party, or by package. only addons in Your home dir are considered as 'installed by you'

Except that Linux doesn't tend to suffer from the browser-infesting stealth installs common to other platforms; the case of packaged addons seems far more common and likely.

ubuntu? yes, you can unistall it, but popular distros do come with pre-installed stuff.
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