6 ms·

If there's anything they need to axe, it's the Gecko team. Just replace it with V8. The whole layout engine too--replace it with Blink. It is inevitable, so mig

by zelly 7y ago

If there's anything they need to axe, it's the Gecko team. Just replace it with V8. The whole layout engine too--replace it with Blink. It is inevitable, so might as well get over with it now and save the wasted human effort and $$$. I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites. Never had that happen with Chromium, which runs through megs of JS like butter. Wouldn't it be nice if an experienced browser dev team maintained a privacy-oriented libre version of Chrome (without manifest v3, sync, and all that trash). Or should they keep doing what they've doing and make the best pro-privacy browser that no one ever uses except indirectly through Tor Browser.

la_fayette 7y ago
Cpu usage of chrome is higher on chrome on mobile. Cpu affects battery life more than memory... so firefox is a good choice on mobile.
- The_rationalist 7y ago
  Websites are not tested for Firefox for Android.
  - tomrod 7y ago
    Indeed. I keep Brave around just to handle the 5% of sites that are decidedly not FF friendly. FF -- fix text sizing. As an example, old-style Reddit renders wonderfully on Brave and terribly terribly small on FF mobile. Another tester site is BOFH.
saagarjha 7y ago
> If there's anything they need to axe, it's the Gecko team. Just replace it with V8. The whole layout engine too--replace it with Blink. It is inevitable, so might as well get over with it now and save the wasted human effort and $$$. And further contribute to the browser monoculture? > I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites. And you've reported this, I assume? > Never had that happen with Chromium, which runs through megs of JS like butter. Really? I explicitly avoid Chrome on my computer because it can't handle the web without chewing through my RAM. > Wouldn't it be nice if an experienced browser dev team maintained a privacy-oriented libre version of Chrome (without manifest v3, sync, and all that trash). Or should they keep doing what they've doing and make the best pro-privacy browser that no one ever uses except indirectly through Tor Browser. I would like the experienced Mozilla team to continue to work on their pro-privacy browser than a decent number of people use.
- zelly 7y ago
  There already is a browser monoculture. Even Microsoft's default browser is now Chromium with a different logo on it. The way to get diversity in browsers is to have adoption. There are hundreds of alternative browsers out there, but they do not diversify the browser market because they are unusable. You want diversity of browser adoption, not diversity of implementation. There just aren't enough users out there to stick to a bad browser for religious reasons. It has to actually be better. The browser market is as free of a market as you can get. Chromium has won. It had an advantage of being written mostly from scratch with lessons from the failures of Firefox and IE. It's basically too late to catch up. While trying to catch up, they will lose what little market share they have left, and the result will be an undisputable browser monoculture. What Mozilla can offer is a different frontend (or "userspace" if you will) to Chromium. That is the realistic approach. > I would like the experienced Mozilla team to continue to work on their pro-privacy browser than a decent number of people use. desktop user agents: 8% and dropping, about to be overtaken by Internet Explorer (lmao) 4.9% with mobile included <1% mobile only https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...
  - bzbarsky 7y ago
    > The browser market is as free of a market as you can get. Given all the UA-sniffing and purposefully sending broken or degraded sites to various browsers going on nowadays (including on Google properties), no, it's not.
  - jorvi 7y ago
    > It had an advantage of being written mostly from scratch with lessons from the failures of Firefox and IE Chrome's main advantage was/is the limitless ocean of resources of one of the biggest three companies in the world, and incessantly being featured on the front page of the biggest (90%+) search machine in the world.
    - zelly 7y ago
      I'm skeptical of this argument. Advertising companies shill garbage to us all the time. If it were bad, people would have stopped using it. As strong as the Google brand is, I don't think people are using it just because they were told to. Consumers, even the least technical of them, are still savvy enough to notice "slow internet". Their friends tell them to switch to Chrome, then they stop complaining about it, done. > Chrome's main advantage was/is the limitless ocean of resources of one of the biggest three companies in the world Yes, this is the reason why it became the best. It had loads of talented developers deployed on it for years and years. You can either complain about it or be happy that it happened and you have access to the fruits of this labor for free.
fencepost 7y ago
Could you clarify "recently" a bit more? Clearly it's after the release of uBlock Origin, but I'm pretty sure that there was a big effort to clean up memory use a few years ago. Maybe it's poor Linux support, I have a distressingly high 4 digit number of tabs open on a Windows box and I don't think I've seen it go past 8gb with multiple weeks of runtime. Edit: Win10 Pro on a Xeon with 48gb ram available
- zelly 7y ago
  Recently meaning 1 month ago
  - fencepost 7y ago
    If you have a limited number of sites that blow FF memory usage up like that within a limited time (and that you're willing to share in a bug report) then that might be something helpful to report. Failing that, there may be some telemetry available that might be able to identify problem areas, though I'm not sure what details would be.
- usr1106 7y ago
  What do you with a 4 digit number of tabs? How can you even find what you are looking for? (Honest question, no attack) I hardly ever have more than 10 tabs open, and aggressively close everything I am not working with. I also shut down my browser twice a day (2 working locations) and never restore the previous session. I do bookmark some pages, but as a matter of fact I notice that I hardly ever refer to my bookmarks. I don't have the feeling that I am missing out on anything.
  - fencepost 7y ago
    What do you with a 4 digit number of tabs? Fail to go back and clear them out, mostly. Most were left open because of something relevant at the time, so I mostly need to spend a little time going through and nuking or nothing. There's been little friction due to leaving them open so it hasn't been a priority. Pretty much the same thing that leaves some people with tens of thousands of messages in their inboxes (I deal with someone who does that and it makes my teeth itch, so my inbox isn't so bad).
basch 7y ago
SpiderMonkey? SM and V8 are javascript engines. Gecko is a browser/layout engine.
roca 7y ago
> I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites. Of course this is not the experience of the vast majority of Firefox users, so it's pointless to suggest that this means something about Firefox's overall quality. You can easily find people making the same sorts of complaints about Chrome.
- toyg 7y ago
  Considering he was on Linux, btw, that was probably not a Mozilla build. Sadly, one of the drawbacks of opensource is that people can take your code and butcher it, and users will blame you.
  - wott 7y ago
    Firefox gigantic leaks happen to me on Windows too. Depending on the mood, it ends with a crash or with Windows warning me that it will kill some processes if that keeps going on.
    - wesgarland 7y ago
      Happens on mac, too. Some mornings I'm beachballing for my whole first coffee. Eventually I just wind up power cycling the mac if I can't open a shell prompt with which to `pkill -9 plugin-container`....
      - toyg 7y ago
        I'm on Mac too and I've never seen anything like this. The odd tab will crash (particularly after I started using containers extensively and more than one adblocker/anti-tracker), but that's it. > pkill -9 plugin-container Ahhh, ok - that's not FF, that's a crap plugin (likely Flash). It's the browser equivalent of blaming Windows when a crap taiwanese driver gets it stuck. You could try uninstalling all that crap.
        7y ago
toyg 7y ago
You were probably not using a production-grade Mozilla build, or a recent one. All sorts of shenanigans go on in the Linux world when it comes to builds.
- zelly 7y ago
  I used the official, automatically-updating build from getfirefox dot com. Package managers are always outdated, which you don't want for browsers (CVE madness).
smnthermes 7y ago
Weren't Quantum/Servo/e10 Firefox's saviors?
- pitay 7y ago
  Strangely after Quantum, Firefox worked worse for me. It is still the case, with Firefox regularly pausing all network activity for a few seconds or even a minute, so I am stuck with websites stuck loading or video stuck loading for a decent amount of time. The UI and everything functions, it is just the network communicating that is stuffed, so anything that requests something has to wait until Firefox's network part decides to respond. I am used to it now, but this happened when Quantum came out and has remained the same for me since.
saghm 7y ago
> I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites. Not sure what was going on with your experience, but I use Firefox on x86_64 machines with far less than 28 GiB of RAM daily and several extensions (including uBlock Origin), and I've never had anything like that happen. I'm not sure how JS-heavy the sites I visit are though, as I don't have any issues, so I don't really pay attention to that.
pitay 7y ago
This is probably too late for anybody to notice but I got FF memory usage down significantly by: 1) Not using the recommended performance settings. Setting 'Content Process Limit' to 2 removed more than half the memory usage IIRC. There are other settings that you will need to go to about:config to change like what size images are cached to memory etc. 2) Use the 'Auto Tab Discard' extension. You will have to configure this to not discard tabs on certain sites or you may lose info you have typed into a webpage. Fortunately this is easily configured by right clicking a tab. At the moment Firefox is using 700MB to display 5 tabs. 4 HN and on Reddit tab. Given that these sites are close to just text I find 700MB absurd, but that is just the web these days.
wesgarland 7y ago
How, exactly, would you replace Gecko with V8? One is a layout engine, one is a JavaScript interpreter.

by zelly 7y ago

la_fayette 7y ago

Cpu usage of chrome is higher on chrome on mobile. Cpu affects battery life more than memory... so firefox is a good choice on mobile.

The_rationalist 7y ago
Websites are not tested for Firefox for Android.
- tomrod 7y ago
  Indeed. I keep Brave around just to handle the 5% of sites that are decidedly not FF friendly. FF -- fix text sizing. As an example, old-style Reddit renders wonderfully on Brave and terribly terribly small on FF mobile. Another tester site is BOFH.

saagarjha 7y ago

> If there's anything they need to axe, it's the Gecko team. Just replace it with V8. The whole layout engine too--replace it with Blink. It is inevitable, so might as well get over with it now and save the wasted human effort and $$$. And further contribute to the browser monoculture? > I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites. And you've reported this, I assume? > Never had that happen with Chromium, which runs through megs of JS like butter. Really? I explicitly avoid Chrome on my computer because it can't handle the web without chewing through my RAM. > Wouldn't it be nice if an experienced browser dev team maintained a privacy-oriented libre version of Chrome (without manifest v3, sync, and all that trash). Or should they keep doing what they've doing and make the best pro-privacy browser that no one ever uses except indirectly through Tor Browser. I would like the experienced Mozilla team to continue to work on their pro-privacy browser than a decent number of people use.

zelly 7y ago
There already is a browser monoculture. Even Microsoft's default browser is now Chromium with a different logo on it. The way to get diversity in browsers is to have adoption. There are hundreds of alternative browsers out there, but they do not diversify the browser market because they are unusable. You want diversity of browser adoption, not diversity of implementation. There just aren't enough users out there to stick to a bad browser for religious reasons. It has to actually be better. The browser market is as free of a market as you can get. Chromium has won. It had an advantage of being written mostly from scratch with lessons from the failures of Firefox and IE. It's basically too late to catch up. While trying to catch up, they will lose what little market share they have left, and the result will be an undisputable browser monoculture. What Mozilla can offer is a different frontend (or "userspace" if you will) to Chromium. That is the realistic approach. > I would like the experienced Mozilla team to continue to work on their pro-privacy browser than a decent number of people use. desktop user agents: 8% and dropping, about to be overtaken by Internet Explorer (lmao) 4.9% with mobile included <1% mobile only https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...
- bzbarsky 7y ago
  > The browser market is as free of a market as you can get. Given all the UA-sniffing and purposefully sending broken or degraded sites to various browsers going on nowadays (including on Google properties), no, it's not.
- jorvi 7y ago
  > It had an advantage of being written mostly from scratch with lessons from the failures of Firefox and IE Chrome's main advantage was/is the limitless ocean of resources of one of the biggest three companies in the world, and incessantly being featured on the front page of the biggest (90%+) search machine in the world.
  - zelly 7y ago
    I'm skeptical of this argument. Advertising companies shill garbage to us all the time. If it were bad, people would have stopped using it. As strong as the Google brand is, I don't think people are using it just because they were told to. Consumers, even the least technical of them, are still savvy enough to notice "slow internet". Their friends tell them to switch to Chrome, then they stop complaining about it, done. > Chrome's main advantage was/is the limitless ocean of resources of one of the biggest three companies in the world Yes, this is the reason why it became the best. It had loads of talented developers deployed on it for years and years. You can either complain about it or be happy that it happened and you have access to the fruits of this labor for free.

fencepost 7y ago

Could you clarify "recently" a bit more? Clearly it's after the release of uBlock Origin, but I'm pretty sure that there was a big effort to clean up memory use a few years ago. Maybe it's poor Linux support, I have a distressingly high 4 digit number of tabs open on a Windows box and I don't think I've seen it go past 8gb with multiple weeks of runtime. Edit: Win10 Pro on a Xeon with 48gb ram available

zelly 7y ago
Recently meaning 1 month ago
- fencepost 7y ago
  If you have a limited number of sites that blow FF memory usage up like that within a limited time (and that you're willing to share in a bug report) then that might be something helpful to report. Failing that, there may be some telemetry available that might be able to identify problem areas, though I'm not sure what details would be.
usr1106 7y ago
What do you with a 4 digit number of tabs? How can you even find what you are looking for? (Honest question, no attack) I hardly ever have more than 10 tabs open, and aggressively close everything I am not working with. I also shut down my browser twice a day (2 working locations) and never restore the previous session. I do bookmark some pages, but as a matter of fact I notice that I hardly ever refer to my bookmarks. I don't have the feeling that I am missing out on anything.
- fencepost 7y ago
  What do you with a 4 digit number of tabs? Fail to go back and clear them out, mostly. Most were left open because of something relevant at the time, so I mostly need to spend a little time going through and nuking or nothing. There's been little friction due to leaving them open so it hasn't been a priority. Pretty much the same thing that leaves some people with tens of thousands of messages in their inboxes (I deal with someone who does that and it makes my teeth itch, so my inbox isn't so bad).

basch 7y ago

SpiderMonkey? SM and V8 are javascript engines. Gecko is a browser/layout engine.

roca 7y ago

> I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites. Of course this is not the experience of the vast majority of Firefox users, so it's pointless to suggest that this means something about Firefox's overall quality. You can easily find people making the same sorts of complaints about Chrome.

toyg 7y ago
Considering he was on Linux, btw, that was probably not a Mozilla build. Sadly, one of the drawbacks of opensource is that people can take your code and butcher it, and users will blame you.
- wott 7y ago
  Firefox gigantic leaks happen to me on Windows too. Depending on the mood, it ends with a crash or with Windows warning me that it will kill some processes if that keeps going on.
  - wesgarland 7y ago
    Happens on mac, too. Some mornings I'm beachballing for my whole first coffee. Eventually I just wind up power cycling the mac if I can't open a shell prompt with which to `pkill -9 plugin-container`....
    - toyg 7y ago
      I'm on Mac too and I've never seen anything like this. The odd tab will crash (particularly after I started using containers extensively and more than one adblocker/anti-tracker), but that's it. > pkill -9 plugin-container Ahhh, ok - that's not FF, that's a crap plugin (likely Flash). It's the browser equivalent of blaming Windows when a crap taiwanese driver gets it stuck. You could try uninstalling all that crap.
      - 7y ago

toyg 7y ago

You were probably not using a production-grade Mozilla build, or a recent one. All sorts of shenanigans go on in the Linux world when it comes to builds.

zelly 7y ago
I used the official, automatically-updating build from getfirefox dot com. Package managers are always outdated, which you don't want for browsers (CVE madness).

smnthermes 7y ago

Weren't Quantum/Servo/e10 Firefox's saviors?

pitay 7y ago
Strangely after Quantum, Firefox worked worse for me. It is still the case, with Firefox regularly pausing all network activity for a few seconds or even a minute, so I am stuck with websites stuck loading or video stuck loading for a decent amount of time. The UI and everything functions, it is just the network communicating that is stuffed, so anything that requests something has to wait until Firefox's network part decides to respond. I am used to it now, but this happened when Quantum came out and has remained the same for me since.

saghm 7y ago

> I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites. Not sure what was going on with your experience, but I use Firefox on x86_64 machines with far less than 28 GiB of RAM daily and several extensions (including uBlock Origin), and I've never had anything like that happen. I'm not sure how JS-heavy the sites I visit are though, as I don't have any issues, so I don't really pay attention to that.

pitay 7y ago

This is probably too late for anybody to notice but I got FF memory usage down significantly by: 1) Not using the recommended performance settings. Setting 'Content Process Limit' to 2 removed more than half the memory usage IIRC. There are other settings that you will need to go to about:config to change like what size images are cached to memory etc. 2) Use the 'Auto Tab Discard' extension. You will have to configure this to not discard tabs on certain sites or you may lose info you have typed into a webpage. Fortunately this is easily configured by right clicking a tab. At the moment Firefox is using 700MB to display 5 tabs. 4 HN and on Reddit tab. Given that these sites are close to just text I find 700MB absurd, but that is just the web these days.

wesgarland 7y ago

How, exactly, would you replace Gecko with V8? One is a layout engine, one is a JavaScript interpreter.