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A few years ago if you'd told me FF would be the RAM-sensitive browser, I'd have laughed you off the internet.
by toxican 10y ago
A few years ago if you'd told me FF would be the RAM-sensitive browser, I'd have laughed you off the internet.
- AdmiralAsshat 10y agoAnd they're still at it, too: https://areweslimyet.com/ https://areweslimyet.com/
- azinman2 10y agoMaybe I'm misreading things but it looks like it's been constantly getting worse since 2012?
- wongarsu 10y agoThey're getting worse at a linear pace, while hardware improves exponentially. Effectively that's a pretty good improvement each year.
- AstralStorm 10y agoExcept mobile hardware which does not. Power usage is always a concern.
- wongarsu 10y ago>Except mobile hardware which does not. Source? RAM available in mobile phones seems to grow exponentially [1]. Power efficency of processors also seems to grow exponentially [2] (does anybody have a source for ARM processors?). [1]: https://i.imgur.com/AWkmMJc.png https://i.imgur.com/AWkmMJc.png (note logarithmic scale) [2]: https://www.karlrupp.net/2013/06/cpu-gpu-and-mic-hardware-characteristics-over-time/ https://www.karlrupp.net/2013/06/cpu-gpu-and-mic-hardware-ch...
- RussianCow 10y agoPower usage has little to do with memory usage. In fact, if the browser is using more RAM as a cache, it won't hit persistent storage as much, which actually increases battery life.
- xorblurb 10y agoBrowser are caching web content, not much persistent storage content... and the OS does persistent storage caching fine, typically no need to try to add your own (poor) layer to do that.
- danudey 10y agoIf that exaggerated RAM use causes other more intensive apps and their data to be evicted, that can cause a much more significant load when the app has to spin up again and re-acquire or re-calculate its state.
- AstralStorm 10y agoThe extra chips are not free. What we are seeing is bringing up the latest low power tech into the phones for now. Except RAM has hit maximum densities per chip already or is very close. Remember that RAM has to be powered on for every refresh cycle... It is "nothing" compared to screen or radios, but it is there. So you won't be seeing more than one Dram chip in there, footprint notwithstanding.
- the8472 10y agomemory bandwidth matters too, not just size
- antisthenes 10y agoNot only is this false, but completely ignores troves of older hardware existing in people's homes that has to run browsers just as well. The average consumer hardware improves at nowhere near exponential rate (although I guess it depends on the timescale and your willingness to fudge the graph to sparse data points).
- wongarsu 10y ago>completely ignores troves of older hardware existing in people's homes that has to run browsers just as well. The performance has gotten worse for users of a computer from 2006, but it has improved for users of ten-year old computers (since a ten-year old computer in 2012 would have been from 2002). If you assume that a computer is less likely to be used the older it gets (and that this rate is roughly stable), then I am not ignoring older hardware at all. >although I guess it depends on the timescale and your willingness to fudge the graph to sparse data points thus is the nature of all real-live long-term trends. If you pick a sufficiently small timeframe, they never work.
- antisthenes 10y ago> The performance has gotten worse for users of a computer from 2006, but it has improved for users of ten-year old computers I'm not sure I follow that logic.
- wongarsu 10y agoI'm saying that the performance of today's firefox on 2006 hardware is better than the performance of 2012's firefox on 2002 hardware. I consider that to be a better measure than to compare both releases on 2006 hardware.
- ZoF 10y agoThanks, makes much more sense stated this way, I also didn't initially understand your point.
- 10y ago
- 1ris 10y agoHardware does not get exponetially better. Maybe it did in 90ties and 00ers. Right now hardwardware gets slimmer, less power consuming and cheaper. But not better. My 12 year old (then mid-end gaming pc) is pretty much exactly as fast as my current, 2(?) year old office machine. (x264 and other mulit-threaed cpu benchbmarks) But it costs a fraction and uses next to no energy. /edit: Yes this is wrong. I made a mistake. My "gaming" desktop is "only" 8 years old. It has a 4 core AMD processor. It's on par with current atoms.
- dTal 10y agoLove the redundancy of "90ties", but what's the etymology of "00ers"?
- rplst8 10y agoAugts?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- yazaddaruvala 10y agoI pronounce "00ers" as "zeroes" Maybe it should be "00es"?
- Fuzzwah 10y agoNoughties
- 10y ago
- smsm42 10y agoMy 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?
- hackuser 10y ago> 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, which means thousands more have been opened and closed. It's using 4 GB of memory (EDIT: Which is more than usual, but it's fine with me).
- yoasif_ 10y agoAgree with you here - this is essentially the reason that I don't use Chrome on my desktop (aside from brief testing, or to load up something quickly that requires Flash). Firefox is still a lot better at RAM and CPU usage when hundreds of tabs are present in the browser. This persists when using e10s.
- srean 10y agoI see your 112 and raise you a 875. FF worked just fine that too with just a less than 1 GB of RAM. I had to block flash, hand tune some of the cache sizes and have a tab uloader etc. No other browser seemed capable of handling my rather <cough> unique <cough> use case.
- smcl 10y agoIf you don't mind me asking, what are you doing that you have 875 tabs open? How are you able to keep track of what you opened, and where etc? I tend to feel anxious and unfocussed when I've got over a dozen or so open - at which point i'll dump some "I'd like to read this" articles into a bookmarks folder which I work through in my down-time, and clean out periodically.
- p0nce 10y agoGetting worse at displaying the same webpage, while actual webpages become heavier. Here I am with 6 opened tab and 800mb of RAM taken by Firefox.
- lawnchair_larry 10y agoActually hardware has regressed, because most traffic is from mobile devices.
- arcatek 10y agoThere's more and more features every month. Add that to the various performance improvements (that can take a hit on the ram, dependending on how they're implemented), and it becomes a bit more understandable why you would see such an increase.
- brokenmachine 10y agoInteresting choice of words, you would think "performance" improvements would make things better, not worse... I do get what you're saying though.
- Lagged2Death 10y agoThe FAQ says: TP5 loads 100 popular webpages, served from a local webserver. I don't know if that means the test pages are up-to-date copies of real-world pages or not. On one hand, real-world pages have certainly been getting heavier, and it would bear mentioning if that fact was not reflected in this test. On the other hand the graph becomes really hard to interpret if the test suite isn't a constant.
- sdabdoub 10y agoThe actual pageset appears to live on build.mozilla.org[1], but is down atm (for me at least). The actual list of pages is on the areweslimyet github repo[2]. [1]https://build.mozilla.org/talos/zips/tp5.zip https://build.mozilla.org/talos/zips/tp5.zip [2]https://github.com/mozilla/areweslimyet/blob/a42e69eaac4c7647a989af2d681ada870d47261f/benchtester/test_memory_usage.py https://github.com/mozilla/areweslimyet/blob/a42e69eaac4c764...
- waterhouse 10y agoIt seems like it would be a really good idea if they also displayed a line for a baseline version of Firefox, holding the version constant so you can see how the webpages have changed.
- nusq 10y agoYou are misreading given that there were big improvements in memory measurment and some of the memory use increase you notice are just firefox measuring better it's own memory
- azinman2 10y agoWhere are those improvements reflected in the graph?
- nusq 10y agoWell..AWSY started a few years ago and many things happend to firefox since then. I cannot tell you exactly what increase corresponds to a memory measurment improvement but i can point you to the blog of Nicholas Netherote https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/
- zobzu 10y agoit makes sense though as more features are in use on the set of tested pages, these will inevitably use more ram. its good to monitor and ensure that stays within acceptable parameters though, and potentially improved upon again. at least the gain is pretty slow since they "fixed all the stuff"
- mook 10y agoIIRC, the set of tested pages are a static snapshot; I don't think the machines have general internet access (because that would lead to spurious failures when the other end has problems, which is annoying as that means nobody can check in code).
- marcosdumay 10y agoFunniest thing is that FF memory usage didn't go down that much. For me it is even higher.
- alyandon 10y agoI'm currently at a little over 1 GB with 8 tabs open. I really wish I had the option to trade off responsiveness for memory usage by being able to mark tabs as "no background activity allowed" so FF could serialize that content to disk when the tab isn't in focus.
- mccr8 10y agoThe 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 state got lost when you switched back. I've heard that some people set Firefox to not autorestore tabs on load, and then periodically close and reopen Firefox, so their background tabs aren't loaded. Pretty clumsy, but I guess it gets the job done. I don't know if there's any addons that do something similar.
- alyandon 10y agoIf the feature existed and it didn't properly restore form content when I switched back to the tab then I'd call that a bug. :-D
- sp332 10y agoThis is the default. If you set it to restore from your previous session on startup (or if it restores your session after a crash, or you choose History->Restore Previous Session), then it will only load tabs when you switch to them.
- MichaelGG 10y agoFF mobile does this and it drives me nuts. I'll be on 4chan, watch a YT clip, then tab back and FF reloads the original HTML. Apart from being slow (takes a few seconds to rerender it all), it also loses AJAX-loaded data. My phone reports it has 600MB of RAM free, so I dunno what's causing FF's behaviour here nor how to disable it. I can't always reproduce it, but it happens enough that every browsing session has some sort of frustration.
- zobzu 10y agohonestly its been years now that FF is one of - if not the - browser which uses the least amount of RAM. Its also one of the most energy efficient on most platforms.. (edge is more efficient on Windows, though it does not take into account that the engine is always running even if another browser is in use)
- nextos 10y agoI can second the energy efficient thing, at least in Linux. I've been tracking lots of programs with powertop, including many browsers, in the quest of an efficient desktop and Firefox is pretty good. I also appreciate its great plugins. With vimperator I can configure Firefox using a dotfile, and setup lots of neat things like: 1. A ssh proxy mode that also routes DNS queries set! network.proxy.socks=localhost set! network.proxy.socks_port=8888 set! network.proxy.socks_remote_dns=true command -nargs=1 proxy set! network.proxy.type=<args> 2. Site-specific Google searches, with autocomplete for the site URL command -nargs=+ -complete=url site open google site:<args> map s :site<space> All this is really neat functionality, and very simple to achieve. I am waiting for good per-tab sandboxing, but in the meanwhile I have aliased firefox to /usr/bin/firejail so the whole application is sandboxed. Apologies for the offtopic, but it's really exciting how a program that seemed to have lost development momentum is becoming really great again. Quite close to being the emacs of browsers if you ask me, with so many features and scriptability. Paradoxically you can get best access to these features with a plugin that tries to emulate vi, but you get the idea!
- brokenmachine 10y agoCould you please give a little more info about ssh through vimperator? Can it do local port forwarding? I couldn't find much doing a google search for "vimperator ssh".
- nextos 10y agoIt can do anything Firefox can, it's just a shortcut using Javascript, nothing Vimperator-specific.
- 10y ago
- flukus 10y agoA few years ago I had a a ptoato android tablet. The thing couldn't play music without stuttering, chrome would take more than a minute to render a page, then another minute if you scrolled. Firefox was first released for android around the time I bought it though, and turned it into a capable web browsing device.