5 ms·

Honestly, the absolute best thing you could do for any dev, is lighten the footprint FF currently has on my ram, and continue to improve the api for add-ons/plu

Honestly, the absolute best thing you could do for any dev, is lighten the footprint FF currently has on my ram, and continue to improve the api for add-ons/plugins. The more stable, extensible and fast FireFox is, the more useful I will find it for development. But if more kludge is added to it, and it continues to get slower/bigger, the less likely I am to continue to use it, regardless of what amazing plugins are available (FireBug, Web Developer Tool Bar, etc) If you are just looking at what's best to add to the browser itself, just look at the plugin market to see what's in wide use.

prg318 14y ago
Your comment is somewhat self-contradicting. Baking plugins into firefox will increase Firefox's memory footprint. Plugins are plugins for a reason -- some people will want the functionality and others will not. How would you like to see the API for plugins/add-ons improved?
- JohnBooty 14y ago
  Dynamically-loaded libraries (.DLL, .so, etc) have been around for decades. A feature can be "baked in" and still loaded (and unloaded) on-demand.
  - paulrouget 14y ago
    We do lazy load the devtools.
    - JohnBooty 14y ago
      Mozilla rocks!
paulrouget 14y ago
We already have a team working on memory consumption (and we already made some gigantic progress). We also have a team working on improving addons APIs (see the new builin SDK). We are also looking at existing extensions.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - gcp 14y ago
    How exactly does this help web developers? This has been considered and rejected as inferior to the current approach. The Android browser used this and it was rewritten to get rid of it. Let's focus on doing things that improve the user experience rather than blindly copying features from other browsers without considering if they make sense. Moreover, it has absolutely nothing to do with the question asked.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      I'm not sure what he said, but I assume he said something about Electrolysis. Didn't they ditch Electrolysis because of issues with many nsplugins? I am not aware of other reasons it was shitcanned.
      - gcp 14y ago
        Plugins and add-ons AFAIK. There are also memory/performance implications, which apparently were not insignificant on mobile platforms. Given that Chrome uses more memory than Firefox, it's perhaps not insignificant on desktop either.
  - kevincrane 14y ago
    Meh, if you're referring to making every tab its own process, I personally don't like that. I'm sure there's performance or stability reasons for Chrome's decision, but I also don't really like having 30 different processes open for the one application.
    - nawitus 14y ago
      Why not? I'd say 30 processes is a lot better than 1 process. You also need to take into consideration that the number of cores is increasing pretty quickly. Pretty soon consumers will have 32 cores and whatnot. I'm a Firefox user but really it's the largest weakness Firefox is having. If I open two new tabs simultaneously, the whole browser can freeze for a bit.
baby 14y ago
This and tabs on the left. It feels like using Tree Style Tab is not really fully optimized. I don't think you need to add a more things for developers. The tools already present are good enough, I saw someone suggesting a built-in sFTP. That's just too much.
- darkstalker 14y ago
  Tree Style Tabs should be a core feature IMHO. It's the single most important feature for me.
  - baby 14y ago
    I still don't understand why it isn't. We have wide screens and we use more and more tabs.
- holloway 14y ago
  Yeah it's not a developer feature but I'd love this too. It's just a good way of managing lots of tabs and developers do have lots of tabs open. Tree tabs are the more conventional way of understanding lots of items (and tabs are hierarchical -- parent tabs are where you opened the current tab from).
mehrzad 14y ago
I thought that the latest browser tests showed that FF used less ram than Chrome. http://lifehacker.com/5976082/browser-speed-tests-chrome-24-firefox-18-internet-explorer-10-and-opera-1212 http://lifehacker.com/5976082/browser-speed-tests-chrome-24-... Unfortunately, reputations stick.
- lelandbatey 14y ago
  Indeed, everything I've seen recently points to FF as having a slim lead over Chrome. It's just that for many of us, the last time we used FF was right before we switched to Chrome, so our perspective is frozen at that point.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- datadiver 14y ago
  I am back to using FF for my everyday browsing as Chrome takes about 2x as much ram with my 50 tabs (casual observations, not benchmarked).
- UberMouse 14y ago
  This is my current Chrome memory usage Browser Google Chrome 25.0.1364.97 Memory Private Shared Total 3,950,040k 12,805k 3,962,845k Virtual memory Private Mapped 4,728,936 k 937,320 k This is with 18 tabs and ~20 extensions. Chrome isn't really light on memory usage anymore. 1.5GB of that is split between Google Reader and the Spotify web player though, anything Javascript heavy seems to use an absurd amount of RAM after it's been left open for a few days.
pmarsh 14y ago
How much RAM do you find FF using? And how much do you have in your machine? Just curious because I rarely find FF creeping up towards a gig and RAM is so ridiculously cheap most of what I have just sits around doing nothing. (Edit: shouldn't have said nothing, but I'm not maxing out even with 4GB unless I am working in Photoshop/Illustrator)
frewsxcv 14y ago
Firefox uses much less memory than Chromium does on my Linux machine. How much memory is Firefox using compared to Chrom(e/ium) for you?
rschmitty 14y ago
When is the last time you compared memory use? I have this thread, HN home, espn, and techcrunch open in both FF and Chrome right now Chrome 454,920K Firefox 487,156K a 30 meg difference is really _not_ a big deal. Anywho I find myself using chrome for dev while FF is for browsing. The AngularJS and Speed Tracer addons are nice for Chrome. I browse with FF because they support tags with bookmarks, which I'm addicted to
gkanai 14y ago
Mozilla is working hard to manage memory/RAM in the most efficient manner. In many 3rd party tests, Chrome uses more RAM than Firefox for the same set of tabs. Mozilla is tracking this here: https://areweslimyet.com/faq.htm https://areweslimyet.com/faq.htm
- kohlerm 14y ago
  What about memory analysis tools for javascript? Im my experience ATM most developers don't have a clue about whether they have memory leaks and where the could optimize (javascript) memory usage. Chrome does have heap snapshots https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/heap-profiling https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/he.... Also chrome has some tools to analyze thos snapshots they are still far from what the Eclipse Memory Analyzer http://eclipse.org/mat/ http://eclipse.org/mat/ can do for Java apps. Fortunately chrome heap snapshot support will be coming soon for the Eclipse Memory Analyzer. IE BTW now has similiar heap analysis tools. Regards, Markus

prg318 14y ago

Your comment is somewhat self-contradicting. Baking plugins into firefox will increase Firefox's memory footprint. Plugins are plugins for a reason -- some people will want the functionality and others will not. How would you like to see the API for plugins/add-ons improved?

JohnBooty 14y ago
Dynamically-loaded libraries (.DLL, .so, etc) have been around for decades. A feature can be "baked in" and still loaded (and unloaded) on-demand.
- paulrouget 14y ago
  We do lazy load the devtools.
  - JohnBooty 14y ago
    Mozilla rocks!

paulrouget 14y ago

We already have a team working on memory consumption (and we already made some gigantic progress). We also have a team working on improving addons APIs (see the new builin SDK). We are also looking at existing extensions.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- gcp 14y ago
  How exactly does this help web developers? This has been considered and rejected as inferior to the current approach. The Android browser used this and it was rewritten to get rid of it. Let's focus on doing things that improve the user experience rather than blindly copying features from other browsers without considering if they make sense. Moreover, it has absolutely nothing to do with the question asked.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    I'm not sure what he said, but I assume he said something about Electrolysis. Didn't they ditch Electrolysis because of issues with many nsplugins? I am not aware of other reasons it was shitcanned.
    - gcp 14y ago
      Plugins and add-ons AFAIK. There are also memory/performance implications, which apparently were not insignificant on mobile platforms. Given that Chrome uses more memory than Firefox, it's perhaps not insignificant on desktop either.
- kevincrane 14y ago
  Meh, if you're referring to making every tab its own process, I personally don't like that. I'm sure there's performance or stability reasons for Chrome's decision, but I also don't really like having 30 different processes open for the one application.
  - nawitus 14y ago
    Why not? I'd say 30 processes is a lot better than 1 process. You also need to take into consideration that the number of cores is increasing pretty quickly. Pretty soon consumers will have 32 cores and whatnot. I'm a Firefox user but really it's the largest weakness Firefox is having. If I open two new tabs simultaneously, the whole browser can freeze for a bit.

baby 14y ago

This and tabs on the left. It feels like using Tree Style Tab is not really fully optimized. I don't think you need to add a more things for developers. The tools already present are good enough, I saw someone suggesting a built-in sFTP. That's just too much.

darkstalker 14y ago
Tree Style Tabs should be a core feature IMHO. It's the single most important feature for me.
- baby 14y ago
  I still don't understand why it isn't. We have wide screens and we use more and more tabs.
holloway 14y ago
Yeah it's not a developer feature but I'd love this too. It's just a good way of managing lots of tabs and developers do have lots of tabs open. Tree tabs are the more conventional way of understanding lots of items (and tabs are hierarchical -- parent tabs are where you opened the current tab from).

mehrzad 14y ago

I thought that the latest browser tests showed that FF used less ram than Chrome. http://lifehacker.com/5976082/browser-speed-tests-chrome-24-firefox-18-internet-explorer-10-and-opera-1212 http://lifehacker.com/5976082/browser-speed-tests-chrome-24-... Unfortunately, reputations stick.

lelandbatey 14y ago
Indeed, everything I've seen recently points to FF as having a slim lead over Chrome. It's just that for many of us, the last time we used FF was right before we switched to Chrome, so our perspective is frozen at that point.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
datadiver 14y ago
I am back to using FF for my everyday browsing as Chrome takes about 2x as much ram with my 50 tabs (casual observations, not benchmarked).
UberMouse 14y ago
This is my current Chrome memory usage Browser Google Chrome 25.0.1364.97 Memory Private Shared Total 3,950,040k 12,805k 3,962,845k Virtual memory Private Mapped 4,728,936 k 937,320 k This is with 18 tabs and ~20 extensions. Chrome isn't really light on memory usage anymore. 1.5GB of that is split between Google Reader and the Spotify web player though, anything Javascript heavy seems to use an absurd amount of RAM after it's been left open for a few days.

pmarsh 14y ago

How much RAM do you find FF using? And how much do you have in your machine? Just curious because I rarely find FF creeping up towards a gig and RAM is so ridiculously cheap most of what I have just sits around doing nothing. (Edit: shouldn't have said nothing, but I'm not maxing out even with 4GB unless I am working in Photoshop/Illustrator)

frewsxcv 14y ago

Firefox uses much less memory than Chromium does on my Linux machine. How much memory is Firefox using compared to Chrom(e/ium) for you?

rschmitty 14y ago

When is the last time you compared memory use? I have this thread, HN home, espn, and techcrunch open in both FF and Chrome right now Chrome 454,920K Firefox 487,156K a 30 meg difference is really _not_ a big deal. Anywho I find myself using chrome for dev while FF is for browsing. The AngularJS and Speed Tracer addons are nice for Chrome. I browse with FF because they support tags with bookmarks, which I'm addicted to

gkanai 14y ago

Mozilla is working hard to manage memory/RAM in the most efficient manner. In many 3rd party tests, Chrome uses more RAM than Firefox for the same set of tabs. Mozilla is tracking this here: https://areweslimyet.com/faq.htm https://areweslimyet.com/faq.htm

kohlerm 14y ago
What about memory analysis tools for javascript? Im my experience ATM most developers don't have a clue about whether they have memory leaks and where the could optimize (javascript) memory usage. Chrome does have heap snapshots https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/heap-profiling https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/he.... Also chrome has some tools to analyze thos snapshots they are still far from what the Eclipse Memory Analyzer http://eclipse.org/mat/ http://eclipse.org/mat/ can do for Java apps. Fortunately chrome heap snapshot support will be coming soon for the Eclipse Memory Analyzer. IE BTW now has similiar heap analysis tools. Regards, Markus