Mozilla Firefox 8.0 In The Wild

[bwat47]

I have a bug filed for Chrome eating tonnes of RAM compared to Firefox. There is no comparison there! Firefox is miles ahead of memory usage compared to Chrome. Chrome is a hog and a leak! Just open gmail and yahoo mail (or any javascript based website which refreshes), and leave it open for 7 days. Don't do anything! Just watch the memory usage of chrome processes (or the task manager view inside the chrome itself) and watch your system crawl!

Chrome annoys the hell out of me! Every time I have tried to use it. Its the BTRFS of the browsers! Good on paper but never delivering the thing!

I agree its absurd how people still constantly rail on firefox for high memory usage, when every benchmark I've seen (along with my personal usage) show firefox uses the least amount of memory out of all the major browsers. Chrome in particular uses the most for me, it often uses 100+ mb more memory than firefox with the same workload. If you are seeing really high memory usage in firefox its almost always 3 possible things: Extensions/Plugins/ Messed up profile. If you can reproduce that high mem usage on a clean profile with no extensions/plugins than by all means report it. The last memory usage issues I had with firefox were with versions 1.x/2.x. Since firefox 3 its been very good about plugging leaks and has only been getting better.

Personally I don't really care too much about memory usage, all my systems have at least 4 gigs of ram and I never get close to running out.

[devsk]

8 GB. Firefox uses about 2 of those with over 200 tabs. Chrome when I tested it reached that with under 50, and was more sluggish than Firefox. No benchmarks, just my subjective feeling that I was more annoyed using Chrome than Firefox.

I have a bug filed for Chrome eating tonnes of RAM compared to Firefox. There is no comparison there! Firefox is miles ahead of memory usage compared to Chrome. Chrome is a hog and a leak! Just open gmail and yahoo mail (or any javascript based website which refreshes), and leave it open for 7 days. Don't do anything! Just watch the memory usage of chrome processes (or the task manager view inside the chrome itself) and watch your system crawl!

Chrome annoys the hell out of me! Every time I have tried to use it. Its the BTRFS of the browsers! Good on paper but never delivering the thing!

[ua=42]

Also, starting with Firefox 10 they will default extensions to be compatible rather than incompatible.

That's good.

[smitty3268]

Tried FF8 on Archlinux few days ago and quickly reverted back to FF7 after seeing the latest release consuming more than 2 GB of RAM. I suspect hardware acceleration being the main source of such memory leaks though. FF7 with acceleration disabled currently uses 133 MB. I can live without that hardware stuff because even now hwaccel test shows 60+ fps. They probably use XRender for that.

Yes, it uses XRender for 2D acceleration.

The 3D acceleration you are talking about is only used for WebGL, which is hardly used on the web. So it's not the cause of your memory leaks, unless you were specifically on some webpage that uses 3D features, which i doubt.

[smitty3268]

Wouldn't the version problem vanish if they had a separate version number for extensions?

E.g.: (using abi for simplicity; pretend it's api if it makes you feel better)
Extensions compatible with ext abi version 1 work with Firefox versions > 4 and <= 6
Likewise, ext abi version 2 work with Firefox version > 6 <= 7

Because it's the browser that will keep track of which abi version works with itself, the burden is lifted from the extension somewhat. They'll still have to make changes when there's a new extension abi break, but for multiple browser versions they otherwise don't have to change anything.

That's what the Jetpack API is for. Also, starting with Firefox 10 they will default extensions to be compatible rather than incompatible.

[Nobu]

Wouldn't the version problem vanish if they had a separate version number for extensions?

E.g.: (using abi for simplicity; pretend it's api if it makes you feel better)
Extensions compatible with ext abi version 1 work with Firefox versions > 4 and <= 6
Likewise, ext abi version 2 work with Firefox version > 6 <= 7

Because it's the browser that will keep track of which abi version works with itself, the burden is lifted from the extension somewhat. They'll still have to make changes when there's a new extension abi break, but for multiple browser versions they otherwise don't have to change anything.

[AnonymousCoward]

Maybe your using a system with very little ram.

8 GB. Firefox uses about 2 of those with over 200 tabs. Chrome when I tested it reached that with under 50, and was more sluggish than Firefox. No benchmarks, just my subjective feeling that I was more annoyed using Chrome than Firefox.

[Reloaded211]

Tried FF8 on Archlinux few days ago and quickly reverted back to FF7 after seeing the latest release consuming more than 2 GB of RAM. I suspect hardware acceleration being the main source of such memory leaks though. FF7 with acceleration disabled currently uses 133 MB. I can live without that hardware stuff because even now hwaccel test shows 60+ fps. They probably use XRender for that.

[bwat47]

And? API/ABI broken? How many addons broke? Nothing works anymore? Asa Dotzler threatening to ban people who just dislike the idea of having no version numbers anymore?
Automated upgrades if you want or not?
Not to mention new security holes.
And: why all this social media integration? Does anybody really make use of it? Can we build the browser without twitter stuff and so on? Twitter is 90% noise and maybe 10% relevant information.

FF is going down the drain if they continue like this.

Stop being such a dramaqueen. I am so sick of this absurd QQing about the new release cycle. Its called a time-based release cycle, get over it. Its not about the version number, and my addons have been working fine since ff4.

I much prefer the new cycle tbh, the old one caused firefox to become far too stagnant compared to the competition. Firefox 3 was so behind the other browsers in regards to speed and the interface until 4 came out, and now they are doing a good job of getting improvements and features to the users faster.

I never heard this complaining about chrome's release cycle, in fact it was recieved very well.

[Nevertime]

Once the number of tabs goes into triple digits, I found Chrome even slower than Firefox.

Maybe your using a system with very little ram. I ran the peacekeepers benchmark beta (yes I know not real world but should show up some evidence of additional tabs resulting in a speed bug) on chrome on my atom netbook with 2 gig ram with a range of 5 additional pages open including phoronix, youtube and others and it scored 490 without the extra tabs it scored 493.