Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

#81

Post by sbierwagen » Thu, Aug 11, 2011, 10:34 PM UTC

Klinky wrote: post #64

kodablah wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tree style tabs[1] have changed my life. There are plenty of times I get near 100 tabs. It automatically opens them as subtabs when ctrl or middle clicked. This is great when browsing source trees online via github, google code, etc. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Vertical tab management is far superior when managing a bunch of tabs. I am not sure how anyone who has more than a handful of tabs can get by horizontally, not sure how people can tell tabs apart when only seeing the favicon & a few characters of the title. What with widescreen displays being the norm now it just makes sense to do vertical tabs.

I use a 1920x1200 monitor rotated 90 degrees. So, while it is technically a widescreen display, it doesn't quite work like one.

Re: Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

#82

Post by marckremers » Thu, Aug 11, 2011, 10:36 PM UTC

There's something inherently wrong about the headline of this. How did they get to such a high usage in the first place? They sacrificed performance for features, and now going back to clean up the mess. Not elegant. This is why I'm sticking with Chrome.

Re: Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

#83

Post by nfm » Thu, Aug 11, 2011, 11:12 PM UTC

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #72

lukeschlather wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a remote area with limited Internet - 364 kbps down 128 kbps up shared among 20-30 office workers and over 100 residents. My computer can handle keeping tabs open in case I didn't properly solve the problem before, or if something similar crops up. So, I have a lot of reference materials open on my desk, and I keep them open because finding the page I was on takes a long time, and loading that page takes even…

I've used Firefox under similar conditions. Some people might not know that it actually includes a feature specifically for this use case. If you start to type in a URL or page name similar to one already open in a tab, the awesomebar dropdown menu lets you jump to the already-opened tab.

You can also prefix your URL/page title search string with '% ' to exclusively search open tabs :)

eg: % Firefox 7 memory

Re: Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

#84

Post by simcop2387 » Thu, Aug 11, 2011, 11:37 PM UTC

nfm wrote: post #83

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Firefox under similar conditions. Some people might not know that it actually includes a feature specifically for this use case. If you start to type in a URL or page name similar to one already open in a tab, the awesomebar dropdown menu lets you jump to the already-opened tab.

You can also prefix your URL/page title search string with '% ' to exclusively search open tabs :) eg: % Firefox 7 memory

Happen to know where you can find out shortcuts like those? I had no idea it was there.

Re: Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

#85

Post by khuey » Thu, Aug 11, 2011, 11:49 PM UTC

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #20

sp332 wrote: post #14

It's not that Firefox is actually using that much memory. It's not even that it has a memory leak in the usual sense of a broken garbage collector or something. It all down to memory fragmentation. You can see illustrations of browser memory fragmentation here: http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/10/memory-fragmentation/ Firefox switched to jemalloc in 2008, which cut memory usage to less than half. http://blog.pavlov.net…

Many of the Firefox 7 fixes that reduced memory usage did not have to do with fragmentation; there were a number of true memory leaks fixed, and other bugs where code was allocating more memory than it ever could need. (For example, I think there was a bug where the find-as-you-type bar could keep the page in memory forever if it wasn't dismissed.)

That's correct, but the big fix people are talking about was a fragmentation fix.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058#c31

Re: Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

#86

Post by carussell » Fri, Aug 12, 2011, 12:09 AM UTC

carussell wrote: post #80

mgkimsal wrote: post #2

I'm reminded of MySQL. "You don't have transaction support" "Sure we do - just handle it in your code" "But I need transactions" "No you don't! That's just overarchitecting!" "No really I do" "Look how fast we are!" ... years later... "Hey look at MySQL - We have transactions! Look how great we are!" etc. I like FF. I use it. But every time there's some comment about FF memory, we usually see a bunch of people coming…

That's interesting. Because every time I've seen Mozilla developers making note of memory improvements over the last few years, I run into someone claiming that every time "Firefox" and "memory usage" came up prior to whichever is current for the time, the developers steadfastly denied a problem. It's getting a bit like the mythical proslytizing vegan; I've run into far more people bitching about however many instanc…

Challenges?

Re: Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

#87

Post by lukeschlather » Fri, Aug 12, 2011, 12:12 AM UTC

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #72

lukeschlather wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a remote area with limited Internet - 364 kbps down 128 kbps up shared among 20-30 office workers and over 100 residents. My computer can handle keeping tabs open in case I didn't properly solve the problem before, or if something similar crops up. So, I have a lot of reference materials open on my desk, and I keep them open because finding the page I was on takes a long time, and loading that page takes even…

I've used Firefox under similar conditions. Some people might not know that it actually includes a feature specifically for this use case. If you start to type in a URL or page name similar to one already open in a tab, the awesomebar dropdown menu lets you jump to the already-opened tab.

That feature is actually broken on Ubuntu 10.10 / standard Gnome with multiple desktops - it tries to switch you to the appropriate tab but can't switch you to the appropriate desktop.

And I'm not sure I really like it anyway - when I re-type a URL I'm usually looking to reload it to grab a fresh copy. I tab-complete the address of my development server and Hacker News very often; anything else I don't usually know the URL off the top of my head, I just remember that I have such and such doc on such and such desktop.

Re: Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

#88

Post by coob » Fri, Aug 12, 2011, 12:49 AM UTC

lukeschlather wrote: post #49

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finally I have two blank desktops that tend to get eaten up by tabs that I use when people come into my office asking questions that I don't know the precise answer to off the top of my head. Why do you keep the tabs open after you've answered their question?

I'm in a remote area with limited Internet - 364 kbps down 128 kbps up shared among 20-30 office workers and over 100 residents. My computer can handle keeping tabs open in case I didn't properly solve the problem before, or if something similar crops up. So, I have a lot of reference materials open on my desk, and I keep them open because finding the page I was on takes a long time, and loading that page takes even…

HTTP Proxy?

Re: Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

#89

Post by mgkimsal » Fri, Aug 12, 2011, 1:50 AM UTC

carussell wrote: post #80

mgkimsal wrote: post #2

I'm reminded of MySQL. "You don't have transaction support" "Sure we do - just handle it in your code" "But I need transactions" "No you don't! That's just overarchitecting!" "No really I do" "Look how fast we are!" ... years later... "Hey look at MySQL - We have transactions! Look how great we are!" etc. I like FF. I use it. But every time there's some comment about FF memory, we usually see a bunch of people coming…

That's interesting. Because every time I've seen Mozilla developers making note of memory improvements over the last few years, I run into someone claiming that every time "Firefox" and "memory usage" came up prior to whichever is current for the time, the developers steadfastly denied a problem. It's getting a bit like the mythical proslytizing vegan; I've run into far more people bitching about however many instanc…

for me it wasn't developers specifically, it was just vocal users. i've not seen much from mozdevs at all contemporaneously with the discussions.

Re: Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

#90

Post by andhow » Fri, Aug 12, 2011, 3:56 AM UTC

hack_edu wrote: post #24

Since when has Firefox/Mozilla NOT promised that their next release will manage memory better?

Umm, the claim wasn't speculative, it was measured on an aurora release that you can test out right now: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel.