6 ms·

Mozilla puts Firefox on a memory diet

63 points by mrsebastian 15y ago

scottshea 15y ago
Massive Happy Dance
dsfasdfdfd 15y ago
'Mozilla is currently looking into whether scripts can be “lazily loaded,” too' I smell bugs coming. Hopefully they will allow a meta tag to indicate whether lazy loading of scripts can be turned off. Same with any other optimizations that could be problematic. I'm all for Firefox getting slimmer though, as I still haven't given it up for Chrome.
crikli 15y ago
They should have done this three years ago, before Google's better, faster, less leaky browser started to gain traction.
- phaylon 15y ago
  You know, I wish I could see that. But I can use Firefox regularly with 80+ tabs without any hitch. Chromium starts getting unresponsive somewhere between 10 and 30 depending on the content.
  - crikli 15y ago
    You're not the first person that's said that; what's your setup? I've had consistent memory problems on WinXP, Win7, and OSX, all of them muscled up machines, especially when using JS intensive apps or leveraging Krumo (yes, I'm a PHP programmer, but I promise I can code, breathe and drool at the same time). Edit: I do use Firebug, so I'm loading up JS resource usage.
    - phaylon 15y ago
      It's a 2GHz Core Duo laptop, 2GB memory. Currently running Ubuntu 11.10. I just restarted yesterday and am already back at 45 tabs. The only thing that can bring it down is the Twitter UI, but that doesn't seem to need many tabs to get there. Extension-wise it's not too much, Adblock, NoScript, Tab Mix Plus, InstantFox, QuickRestart, and Firebug as well. I can see Firefox eating more Memory than I'd like, but it's not much of an issue. Chromium seemed to be more clogging the CPU, which I find worse since this is a laptop and thus Firefox keeps the whole thing cooler. I think the answer to the question of whether to use Chrome or Firefox is heavily dependent on use-cases.
      - drats 15y ago
        http://mobile.twitter.com/ http://mobile.twitter.com/ saved me from having to quit using Twitter. The main UI can't even scroll smoothly on my i5 cpu with gigs of free RAM running Chrome.
        phaylon 15y ago
        That's brilliant, thank you.
acqq 15y ago
Already discussed and with more information: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3183270 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3183270
zuppy 15y ago
They said the same thing when 7 came out... I'm on 8 and it still eats 1.2GB+ of RAM out of 4 at the end of the day. I'm still using it only because of Firebug.
- m_eiman 15y ago
  These tweaks will be in FF11 or thereabouts...
- sp332 15y ago
  I've got a dozen addons, and I keep gmail, to-do list etc. open all day long. I've had it open for several days now with at least 10 tabs open and it's using less than 0.5 GB out of 8. What's your usage that gets it over 1 GB? Also, what can you do with Firebug that you can't do with Chrome's "inspector"?
  - zuppy 15y ago
    Usually I keep in tabs Google Reader, Facebook (not always on), Gmail, sometimes Groove Shark plus many random sites (maybe ~25 tabs). ...as with extensions: AdBlock Plus, Download Statusbar, Flashblock, iReader, Live Http Headers and TinEye. I just took this screenshot of the task manager: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2311018/temp/shot.jpg http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2311018/temp/shot.jpg I honestly don't remember what I don't like about web inspector, I've tried it a while ago and I couldn't do all the things I wanted. Maybe I'll give it another shot sometimes. edit: my biggest issue with chrome was that for few years you couldn't see the source code of a page sent through a post request: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=523 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=523 They say it's fixed now, maybe it is...
    - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
      I find flash sites seem to be the big problem, if I have flash block on then the same sites don't cause the same slow down. This on Kubuntu 11.10 with FF7 (which FF I'm finding more responsive than previous versions).
  - 15y ago
windle 15y ago
As a bunch of other people in the comments have noted, Firefox can take a huge amount of memory, the one thing they also have in common.... is the Firebug extension. It should come as no surprise to them then that Firefox is not actually leaking the memory... Firebug is. A quick Google search for "Firebug memory leak" will lead to multiple examples of massive Firebug memory leaks. It's a bummer that Firefox gets the blame for Firebug's memory leaks. If people would like to avoid that, the best thing would be to use Firefox's multiple profile feature so that they activate/install Firebug in a Developer profile, and keep their general browsing profile without Firebug. It's rather amazing just how much, and how fast Firebug can leak memory as using a separate profile will make abundantly clear. http://lifehacker.com/5481213/master-multiple-firefox-profiles-for-more-productive-browsing http://lifehacker.com/5481213/master-multiple-firefox-profil...
- emp_ 15y ago
  Browsers are platforms, wouldn't be the same to blame Firefox lack of developer environment?
  - windle 15y ago
    Good point, I forgot to mention that Firefox is expanding the developer tools it comes with: http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/08/16/new-tools-in-mozilla-firefox-help-developers-drive-the-web-forward/ http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/08/16/new-tools-in-mozilla... Also, it hasn't landed in Nightly yet, but there's some really slick dev tools that are being built into Firefox: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/07/tilt-visualize-your-web-page-in-3d/ http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/07/tilt-visualize-your-web-pag... There's some nice CSS and Javascript tools coming too, but I can't seem to find any URL's on them at the moment.
- syncsynchalt 15y ago
  I didn't know this, but to be fair webkit's inspector is as good as firebug for my needs and doesn't leak. Maybe the answer is to roll firebug into default firefox to force the issue and get the leaks addressed?
_badlogin 15y ago
Too little, too late. I switched to Chrome a year ago.
orthecreedence 15y ago
I hate to say it, but everybody is LEAVING firefox already because of this. Closing it and restarting every hour got old. Even with the latest versions it does this. The fact that they keep claiming "it's a feature!!" is what made me the most angry. Firefox is now useless to me as a web browser, I use it only in limited cases for web development. Chrome has completely replaced it. "Oh but it's your add-ons." No, it's not. Even disabling my add-ons and starting with a new profile Firefox eventually consumes more and more memory. "Well that's what happens because it's saving history." Ok, force restart it. It will open all the same tabs, each with the same amount of history for that tab...5% of the memory usage of before restarting it. The thing is a bloated beast. I really do hope they fix it. I loved firefox when I used to use it, but it's not very useful to me as it is (firebug or not).

63 points by mrsebastian 15y ago

Massive Happy Dance

'Mozilla is currently looking into whether scripts can be “lazily loaded,” too' I smell bugs coming. Hopefully they will allow a meta tag to indicate whether lazy loading of scripts can be turned off. Same with any other optimizations that could be problematic. I'm all for Firefox getting slimmer though, as I still haven't given it up for Chrome.

crikli 15y ago

They should have done this three years ago, before Google's better, faster, less leaky browser started to gain traction.

phaylon 15y ago
You know, I wish I could see that. But I can use Firefox regularly with 80+ tabs without any hitch. Chromium starts getting unresponsive somewhere between 10 and 30 depending on the content.
- crikli 15y ago
  You're not the first person that's said that; what's your setup? I've had consistent memory problems on WinXP, Win7, and OSX, all of them muscled up machines, especially when using JS intensive apps or leveraging Krumo (yes, I'm a PHP programmer, but I promise I can code, breathe and drool at the same time). Edit: I do use Firebug, so I'm loading up JS resource usage.
  - phaylon 15y ago
    It's a 2GHz Core Duo laptop, 2GB memory. Currently running Ubuntu 11.10. I just restarted yesterday and am already back at 45 tabs. The only thing that can bring it down is the Twitter UI, but that doesn't seem to need many tabs to get there. Extension-wise it's not too much, Adblock, NoScript, Tab Mix Plus, InstantFox, QuickRestart, and Firebug as well. I can see Firefox eating more Memory than I'd like, but it's not much of an issue. Chromium seemed to be more clogging the CPU, which I find worse since this is a laptop and thus Firefox keeps the whole thing cooler. I think the answer to the question of whether to use Chrome or Firefox is heavily dependent on use-cases.
    - drats 15y ago
      http://mobile.twitter.com/ http://mobile.twitter.com/ saved me from having to quit using Twitter. The main UI can't even scroll smoothly on my i5 cpu with gigs of free RAM running Chrome.
      - phaylon 15y ago
        That's brilliant, thank you.

acqq 15y ago

Already discussed and with more information: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3183270 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3183270

zuppy 15y ago

They said the same thing when 7 came out... I'm on 8 and it still eats 1.2GB+ of RAM out of 4 at the end of the day. I'm still using it only because of Firebug.

m_eiman 15y ago
These tweaks will be in FF11 or thereabouts...
sp332 15y ago
I've got a dozen addons, and I keep gmail, to-do list etc. open all day long. I've had it open for several days now with at least 10 tabs open and it's using less than 0.5 GB out of 8. What's your usage that gets it over 1 GB? Also, what can you do with Firebug that you can't do with Chrome's "inspector"?
- zuppy 15y ago
  Usually I keep in tabs Google Reader, Facebook (not always on), Gmail, sometimes Groove Shark plus many random sites (maybe ~25 tabs). ...as with extensions: AdBlock Plus, Download Statusbar, Flashblock, iReader, Live Http Headers and TinEye. I just took this screenshot of the task manager: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2311018/temp/shot.jpg http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2311018/temp/shot.jpg I honestly don't remember what I don't like about web inspector, I've tried it a while ago and I couldn't do all the things I wanted. Maybe I'll give it another shot sometimes. edit: my biggest issue with chrome was that for few years you couldn't see the source code of a page sent through a post request: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=523 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=523 They say it's fixed now, maybe it is...
  - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    I find flash sites seem to be the big problem, if I have flash block on then the same sites don't cause the same slow down. This on Kubuntu 11.10 with FF7 (which FF I'm finding more responsive than previous versions).
- 15y ago

windle 15y ago

As a bunch of other people in the comments have noted, Firefox can take a huge amount of memory, the one thing they also have in common.... is the Firebug extension. It should come as no surprise to them then that Firefox is not actually leaking the memory... Firebug is. A quick Google search for "Firebug memory leak" will lead to multiple examples of massive Firebug memory leaks. It's a bummer that Firefox gets the blame for Firebug's memory leaks. If people would like to avoid that, the best thing would be to use Firefox's multiple profile feature so that they activate/install Firebug in a Developer profile, and keep their general browsing profile without Firebug. It's rather amazing just how much, and how fast Firebug can leak memory as using a separate profile will make abundantly clear. http://lifehacker.com/5481213/master-multiple-firefox-profiles-for-more-productive-browsing http://lifehacker.com/5481213/master-multiple-firefox-profil...

emp_ 15y ago
Browsers are platforms, wouldn't be the same to blame Firefox lack of developer environment?
- windle 15y ago
  Good point, I forgot to mention that Firefox is expanding the developer tools it comes with: http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/08/16/new-tools-in-mozilla-firefox-help-developers-drive-the-web-forward/ http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/08/16/new-tools-in-mozilla... Also, it hasn't landed in Nightly yet, but there's some really slick dev tools that are being built into Firefox: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/07/tilt-visualize-your-web-page-in-3d/ http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/07/tilt-visualize-your-web-pag... There's some nice CSS and Javascript tools coming too, but I can't seem to find any URL's on them at the moment.
syncsynchalt 15y ago
I didn't know this, but to be fair webkit's inspector is as good as firebug for my needs and doesn't leak. Maybe the answer is to roll firebug into default firefox to force the issue and get the leaks addressed?

_badlogin 15y ago

Too little, too late. I switched to Chrome a year ago.

orthecreedence 15y ago

I hate to say it, but everybody is LEAVING firefox already because of this. Closing it and restarting every hour got old. Even with the latest versions it does this. The fact that they keep claiming "it's a feature!!" is what made me the most angry. Firefox is now useless to me as a web browser, I use it only in limited cases for web development. Chrome has completely replaced it. "Oh but it's your add-ons." No, it's not. Even disabling my add-ons and starting with a new profile Firefox eventually consumes more and more memory. "Well that's what happens because it's saving history." Ok, force restart it. It will open all the same tabs, each with the same amount of history for that tab...5% of the memory usage of before restarting it. The thing is a bloated beast. I really do hope they fix it. I loved firefox when I used to use it, but it's not very useful to me as it is (firebug or not).