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The other thing is that Chrome updates work. They've only broken something once in I think 3 years of daily use at this point (some update unchecked "warn befo

by earl 14y ago

The other thing is that Chrome updates work. They've only broken something once in I think 3 years of daily use at this point (some update unchecked "warn before quitting"). They also don't generally create popups and the update process itself is literally invisible. Firefox on the other hand... sigh. I really liked that browser, but the updates, and the broken plugins, and the shit memory management, and the developers' heads up their shitty asses denying their shit memory management, and did I mention the enormous memory usage on OSX? Chrome essentially has the same uptime as my laptop, ie months. Firefox required daily restarts with the same browsing patterns. Plus they regularly corrupt the backing file that holds the sites you had open in your browser, so before restarting the browser to get ram back, it's a best practice to copy the location of each and every open tab to a text file. We got my gf's laptop 8 gigs of ram to accomodate ff and I'm working on talking her into chrome. A browser written by people who know how to use free(3). Plus the updates don't hork random stuff. Plus on the rare occasions I've restarted the browser it has never broken the backing store holding the open tabs.

slurgfest 14y ago
Memory management was terrible for ages and ages before the updates. I don't think the updates ever broke memory management. if you don't use addons, the memory management in Firefox is pretty good - actually measure it competitively against Chrome sometime
- dbaupp 14y ago
  I find it is much better than Chrome. If I have more than a handful of tabs open in Chrome then Chrome starts using significantly more than a GB of RAM (in total, across all the separate Chrome processes), while I've currently got a Firefox session that has been open for more than a week, with 30+ tabs, and is using just under 1 GB.
  - kalleboo 14y ago
    How are you adding together the Chrome processes? Often when you look at the memory usage of a process, it'll incude all the shared libraries it's using. So if you add together multiple processes, you'll multiply the memory used by that shared library by the number of processes you're adding, even though that memory is, well, shared.
    - dbaupp 14y ago
      Oh. Hadn't realised that, thanks for the info. :) (I am doing it naively, just from the output of ps, so your point applies. Is there an Chrome equivalent for Firefox's about:memory?) Even so, with many tabs open, my computer hits swap far more under Chrome than Firefox. Edit: Ah, yep, answered my own question: about:memory works in Chrome too. Using that, I've got Chrome at 360 MB with 5 tabs and 2 extensions, while Firefox is at 900 with 30+ loaded tabs and ~20 extensions.
dangoor 14y ago
Actually, Firefox developers care a good deal about memory management. More than Add-on authors unfortunately. We've had a project called MemShrink running for about a year and it has been making steady progress. and that progress has been shipping to users. The current Aurora channel release even has a fix for most add-on bad behavior. Firefox actually stacks up really well in memory usage (even in third party tests). (I work for Mozilla but was not involved in MemShrink. Also, I wrote this on my phone, so I hope there are no embarrassing misspellings. )
- ascendant 14y ago
  Sadly though now users have had years of poor memory management burned into their memories. Regardless of if it was FF or the addons, it's associated with FF now and will take time to shed.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- thaumasiotes 14y ago
  I quit firefox purely over its tendency to leak my entire RAM and force restarts. I was told at the time, and do believe, that the memory leaking was an addon problem. However... firefox was sold on the idea of addons. When your two main messages are "we're the most convenient browser; just look at all our awesome addons!" and "you can't use the addons, or your computer will implode", you've got a serious problem.
  - derefr 14y ago
    I don't see how that's a serious problem. An add-on ecosystem can be explained literally as "we let third parties who aren't as skilled as browser-developers develop (optional) parts of our browser." That has both obvious advantages (there are way more developers passing that lower bar, serving many more needs) and obvious drawbacks (a lot of them... can't code very well.)
  - forrestthewoods 14y ago
aviraldg 14y ago
Okay, this might sound funny, but Firefox is actually faster than Chrome on my crappy netbook which has about a gig of RAM. Plus, it can handle more tabs (200+, don't ask) without bringing the thing to a screeching halt. I'm pretty sure you're talking about an earlier version of Firefox -- I agree, there were problems there, but things have gotten much better with the latest versions. I run Firefox Aurora (which is kinda equivalent to Chrome's dev channel) and I haven't seen anything breaking yet. I've also used Chrome [dev] for a while and while it was pretty good, it also decided to declare that "my user profile was corrupt" after every few days. Not fun. Plus, it could hardly handle 50+ tabs, but I guess that is due to the way the Chromium sandbox and tab threading model works (and the Atom processor in my netbook.) tl;dr: I run Firefox Aurora (with 200+ tabs) on a netbook with 1 gig of RAM. Where's that memory problem you were talking about?
- pdw 14y ago
  That matches my experience. Chrome can (according to its internal task manager) easily use over 100MB per tab which adds up quickly. Firefox is much more frugal. And for me Chrome's memory leaks are worse then Firefox's ever were.
TwoBit 14y ago
huh? Under heavy usage FireFox is better at memory management than Chrome. The memory problems were, what, three years ago or more?
- noselasd 14y ago
  That may be, but you can get rid of the memory that chrome uses. Just close the tab, which releases that memory - since one tab is run as a separate process which then exits and releases all memory. With Firefox, you have to restart Firefox. All tabs run in the same process, and memory is generally not released back to the OS when someone just calls free() or delete.

by earl 14y ago

slurgfest 14y ago

Memory management was terrible for ages and ages before the updates. I don't think the updates ever broke memory management. if you don't use addons, the memory management in Firefox is pretty good - actually measure it competitively against Chrome sometime

dbaupp 14y ago
I find it is much better than Chrome. If I have more than a handful of tabs open in Chrome then Chrome starts using significantly more than a GB of RAM (in total, across all the separate Chrome processes), while I've currently got a Firefox session that has been open for more than a week, with 30+ tabs, and is using just under 1 GB.
- kalleboo 14y ago
  How are you adding together the Chrome processes? Often when you look at the memory usage of a process, it'll incude all the shared libraries it's using. So if you add together multiple processes, you'll multiply the memory used by that shared library by the number of processes you're adding, even though that memory is, well, shared.
  - dbaupp 14y ago
    Oh. Hadn't realised that, thanks for the info. :) (I am doing it naively, just from the output of ps, so your point applies. Is there an Chrome equivalent for Firefox's about:memory?) Even so, with many tabs open, my computer hits swap far more under Chrome than Firefox. Edit: Ah, yep, answered my own question: about:memory works in Chrome too. Using that, I've got Chrome at 360 MB with 5 tabs and 2 extensions, while Firefox is at 900 with 30+ loaded tabs and ~20 extensions.

dangoor 14y ago

Actually, Firefox developers care a good deal about memory management. More than Add-on authors unfortunately. We've had a project called MemShrink running for about a year and it has been making steady progress. and that progress has been shipping to users. The current Aurora channel release even has a fix for most add-on bad behavior. Firefox actually stacks up really well in memory usage (even in third party tests). (I work for Mozilla but was not involved in MemShrink. Also, I wrote this on my phone, so I hope there are no embarrassing misspellings. )

ascendant 14y ago
Sadly though now users have had years of poor memory management burned into their memories. Regardless of if it was FF or the addons, it's associated with FF now and will take time to shed.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
thaumasiotes 14y ago
I quit firefox purely over its tendency to leak my entire RAM and force restarts. I was told at the time, and do believe, that the memory leaking was an addon problem. However... firefox was sold on the idea of addons. When your two main messages are "we're the most convenient browser; just look at all our awesome addons!" and "you can't use the addons, or your computer will implode", you've got a serious problem.
- derefr 14y ago
  I don't see how that's a serious problem. An add-on ecosystem can be explained literally as "we let third parties who aren't as skilled as browser-developers develop (optional) parts of our browser." That has both obvious advantages (there are way more developers passing that lower bar, serving many more needs) and obvious drawbacks (a lot of them... can't code very well.)
- forrestthewoods 14y ago

aviraldg 14y ago

Okay, this might sound funny, but Firefox is actually faster than Chrome on my crappy netbook which has about a gig of RAM. Plus, it can handle more tabs (200+, don't ask) without bringing the thing to a screeching halt. I'm pretty sure you're talking about an earlier version of Firefox -- I agree, there were problems there, but things have gotten much better with the latest versions. I run Firefox Aurora (which is kinda equivalent to Chrome's dev channel) and I haven't seen anything breaking yet. I've also used Chrome [dev] for a while and while it was pretty good, it also decided to declare that "my user profile was corrupt" after every few days. Not fun. Plus, it could hardly handle 50+ tabs, but I guess that is due to the way the Chromium sandbox and tab threading model works (and the Atom processor in my netbook.) tl;dr: I run Firefox Aurora (with 200+ tabs) on a netbook with 1 gig of RAM. Where's that memory problem you were talking about?

pdw 14y ago
That matches my experience. Chrome can (according to its internal task manager) easily use over 100MB per tab which adds up quickly. Firefox is much more frugal. And for me Chrome's memory leaks are worse then Firefox's ever were.

TwoBit 14y ago

huh? Under heavy usage FireFox is better at memory management than Chrome. The memory problems were, what, three years ago or more?

noselasd 14y ago
That may be, but you can get rid of the memory that chrome uses. Just close the tab, which releases that memory - since one tab is run as a separate process which then exits and releases all memory. With Firefox, you have to restart Firefox. All tabs run in the same process, and memory is generally not released back to the OS when someone just calls free() or delete.