19 ms·

Firefox, Heal Thyself

154 points by pilgrim689 13y ago

diminoten 13y ago
> and your browser can start healing itself I wonder what some specifics are for this statement.
- sp332 13y ago
  One way, which is admittedly heavy-handed, is already available. If you go to Help->Troubleshooting Information, there's a button to "Reset Firefox". https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi... Hopefully future releases will automatically detect problems in individual subsystems and give you more fine-grained control.
  - ubojan 13y ago
    Yup, this is currently the best and quickest way to fix problems with Firefox. If you set up sync, you can reset browser and reload context (extensions, settings, history, passwords, ...) in a few minutes.
- brightghost 13y ago
  Curious to see this today, as the FF enterprise mailing list has been filled with grumbling this week about FF's inability to auto-update itself or its plugins, and the headaches that causes us IT folk when paired with the auto-quarantining of outdated plugins recently implemented.
  - slacka 13y ago
    I just fired up Firefox and did a help->about firefox. Guess what? I'm still on version 17! Despite all their claims about the silent auto-update feature, it doesn't work if you are running as a limited normal user account. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711475 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711475 I don't know if this is what you're talking about, but I'd don't blame the "IT folk". Seriously, what kind of idiot requires their users to run with administrator accounts for their software to function properly? What is this 2005?
- DEinspanjer 13y ago
  It is still a bit forward looking, but I can give you one quick "for instance": Using the data that is being collected today, we can analyze poor performance and stability and correlate it with certain extensions and plugins, going down to the level of version and platform specifics. We can then provide better blocklisting based on this data, in addition to providing the user with the tool to see the results for themselves and offer suggestions such as updating an add-on or uninstalling it.
devNoise 13y ago
Will this help them figure out that they need to fix memory leaks?
- shocks 13y ago
  They're already fixing memory leaks. In fact, Firefox now uses less memory than Chrome. Let me guess, you're another person who hasn't used Firefox in a few years hasn't bothered to check out the latest versions at all? :)
  - esrauch 13y ago
    It is rather unfortunate that there was a couple years there that FF lagged behind Chrome, it is really still having lasting impact on the brand. That said, the developer tools (both Firebug and the newer native ones) are really just not on par with Chrome now. I know they have people working on it, so I am looking forward to what they come up with.
    - untog 13y ago
      The fact that there are both native and Firebug developer tools still baffles me- if they'd concentrated on one of the two they might be a lot more competitive with Chrome.
      - shocks 13y ago
        They're making a push to work on the native tools now. The native tools in Nightly are actually pretty usable now, though still not as advanced as Chrome. It'll come, I'm sure. :)
      - potch 13y ago
        What's baffling about it? There are the native developer tools, but add-ons can still provide developer functionality.
  - rexreed 13y ago
    For me, alas, with 5 windows open and many, many tabs per window, Firefox regularly climbs into the 1 Gig+ memory range. The solution: less windows and tabs, I guess. But I was hoping / expecting the memory profile to change significantly over the past few builds. And yes, I am using the latest build, I check about:memory regularly, stripped out the unneeded add-ons, but maybe I've just got too much stuff open and those pages have lots of script activity. Is my usage the issue or is there something that can be improved in my scenario?
thomasbk 13y ago
Part of this is somewhat similar to how Windows 8 measures "Start-up impact" of applications that auto-start, and allows you to disable them with two clicks. (In task manager)
- sp332 13y ago
  Internet Explorer will even tell you how long each plugin takes to start. You can see the stats in [Gear icon]-> Manage Add-ons. My slowest plugin is actually Google Chrome Frame :p
  - TheCraiggers 13y ago
    I'd say that, given the scope of what that plugin is doing, a slow startup is not exactly surprising, and is rather expected.
acjohnson55 13y ago
I'm not sure if this applies, but I really hope they provide better tools to identify badly behaving webpages. Sometimes when my CPU or memory are being cranked by Firefox, I really just want to kill the one tab out of 50 that's causing all the problems.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  It would be great if they could roll such a feature into a convenient UI. Just a magic "Firefox, whatever you are doing.. knock it off" button would be great. It could look at system memory usage and CPU usage, determine if either is high enough that it might cause user distress, and kill whatever tabs are the most likely offenders.
  - BrianEatWorld 13y ago
    I like this idea. A bit like the pause buttons on my VMs. I have this type of issue more with Chrome than Firefox though and it always seems to be related to leaving a tab open with a video for a long time, even if it isn't being played.
    - progrock 13y ago
      At least with Chrome there is the built in Task Manager.
      - ianox 13y ago
        > At least with Chrome there is the built in Task Manager. And the about:memory page, which shows you memory usage of all your extensions too.
      - bad_user 13y ago
        I'd love for Firefox to have a task manager like that.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
Goronmon 13y ago
Funnily enough, Firefox died on my system today and I haven't been able to get it working since. Just freezes after start up, even in safe mode (well, when it even booted up, which it stopped doing after a couple tries).
- vanderZwan 13y ago
  On my computer it sometimes doesn't open a window unless I open a second instance of Firefox, and then both suddenly load. Try that maybe?
  - Goronmon 13y ago
    Doesn't really matter if it loads, because it just crashes anyways, haha.
  - piyush_soni 13y ago
    That second 'instance' (it actually keeps only one instance running) might not be helping in bringing up your windows. Try clearing your (startup/local) cache, it might have become really big. I do that whenever my Firefox takes long times to start - if you check in Process Monitor, at that time it is dealing with those cache folders.
    - vanderZwan 13y ago
      I dunno, I just noticed it "pops" up as soon as I try to start it again. Note that this is the first start I'm talking about. I'll try that cache cleaning.
- rythie 13y ago
  Your sqlite files might be locked - try either removing or moving them and copying them back.
  - Goronmon 13y ago
    I made a token gesture at fixing the sqlite files, but I don't have the patience to manipulate obscure files in AppData to get a browser to work. Stuff like this is why Chrome is my primary browser.
hollerith 13y ago
I wish one of the most important tools for publishing and consuming text on the internet weren't so prone to problems as to require a dedicated health-reporting subsystem. My text editor and my email client don't need dedicated health-reporting subsystems.
- option_greek 13y ago
  You surely must not be using Outlook that suffers from morbid obesity.
- scott_s 13y ago
  Your text editor and email client aren't also capable of running arbitrary applications. Modern web browsers have more in common with operating systems than with text editors and email clients.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - hollerith 13y ago
    >Modern web browsers have more in common with operating systems than with text editors and email clients. That is the core of the problem right there. The need for a new health-reporting system is just a symptom or a consequence.
    - scott_s 13y ago
      I rather like this fact. It allows things like GMail, YouTube and the fantastic work I see on the NY Times.
      - hollerith 13y ago
        I wish you could have your GMail, YouTube, etc, and I could have a way to use the internet to access a wide variety of writings without my having to deal with a system so complicated or unreliable that users are being invited to learn a new health-monitoring subsystem for it. ADDED. An argument can be made that my operating system is already a system so complicated or unreliable that it requires its own specialized health-monitoring subsystem (of which Unix commands ps, free and top and OS X's Activity Monitor are a part). My response is that I resent having to deal with two such systems instead of only one.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
olympus 13y ago
It looks like the Mozilla team is doing such great stuff nowadays. I converted to Chrome a few years back and it seemed like Firefox was stagnant. But I think the competition has been good for them, they've been doing lots of neat stuff recently. I'm thinking about switching back, or figuring out a way to use two different browsers.
com2kid 13y ago
My single largest issue with Firefox stability is constantly running into the 32bit memory barrier. Either split tabs out into multiple processes, or enable 64bit support already. My browser crashes on average twice a day due to running out of memory and FF just giving up. It doesn't even crash gracefully, it just up and quits. (I frequently have ~100 tabs open, and I am quite thankful that Firefox lets me search across my tabs! Very useful feature)
- thefreeman 13y ago
  I really can't understand how many people consistently talk about having hundreds of tabs open. What are you so afraid of closing a website for? If it's that important, you will remember to go back to it later. Usually, it's not. Once I get to 10 or 15 tabs I usually end up closing all but one or two just to stay focused.
  - com2kid 13y ago
    > I really can't understand how many people consistently talk about having hundreds of tabs open. What are you so afraid of closing a website for? If it's that important, you will remember to go back to it later. Usually, it's not. Well the hacker news homepage for instance. I typically go down and middle click on any story I find interesting, and the comments section to go with it. This can easily end up with 8-14 tabs open. Now repeat the same thing for my Reddit frontpage (or just /r/programming!) and I can easily hit another 30 tabs within a couple of minutes. Every URL someone posts in the comments that seems interesting also gets opened in a new tab. An active discussion easily results in another 5-10 tabs (and remember, that is per discussion thread!). If one of those tabs goes to Wikipedia, then I'll middle click any links in the Wikipedia article that sound relevant. This can add another 10 tabs easily. Within 10 minutes of turning on my computer I am now easily up to 50+ tabs.
    - progrock 13y ago
      I understand how easy that is to do. But when do you have the time to read them? Part of the fun of the web, is getting a little lost in it. But I totally loose focus. Have you ever tried limiting yourself to one window and the judicious use of the back button?
dredmorbius 13y ago
My observations, using both Firefox (well, Iceweasel 20.0-1~bpo60+1), and Chrome (Chromium 26.0.1410.43-1). In many ways, I prefer Firefox as a browser (better plugins, controls, tabs, too much Google influence already). My Firefox experience is getting to the point it's virtually unusable, with very, very slow response to any actions (especially new tab / new window functions). We're talking about many seconds, sometimes a minute or more. While the overall footprint of Firefox is smaller than Chrome, Chrome's sandboxing of tabs gives vastly better user-based memory management: I've got the option of killing off tabs (without closing them) that are using excessive memory, restoring net system responsiveness. Firefox uses a single process space, and slowness in one tab seems to extend elsewhere (my general observation, not based on analysis). A larger part of the problem is a combination of how browsers facilitate (or don't) content management and browsing as a task and workflow, and the increasing emphasis on highly-interactive sites. The lack of such tools, and especially the paucity of bookmarks as a management tool, means that my usual workflow management is: - Open browser. - Open lots of tabs. It's not uncommon for me to have 100s of tabs open across multiple browser windows. For Firefox, Tree Style Tabs at least give some semblance of structure as to how I've traced down some link path. The flat horizontal tabs of Chrome absolutely suck in this regard. Having a better way to navigate the tabspace would help greatly. What I've recently discovered, and what's radically changing my use of the Web, is Readability (Instapaper and Pocket are similar services). It's amazing. I've written a bit about this at Google+: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/PhQR421etdT https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/PhQR421e... https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/fVK7aJuBT5Q https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/fVK7aJuB... Readability solves three problems: It renders web pages viewable. Far, far, far too many websites have designs which are overtly hostile to actually reading content (even HN, to some degree). Even those which are readable are far too distracting in the present ad-driven eyeball economy. It manages my reading list. Rather than opening content in tabs, I append it to my reading list. Readability also offers tags (though limited to 500 per user, a wall I hit 2 days in) to help organize content (Firefox offers these for bookmarks, Chrome does not). And the reading list is available across different browsers and devices (I'm not usually a fan of sharing personal information, least of all my reading interests, through a service, but in this case the convenience factor wins out). Both of these factors could be addressed, somewhat, in a browser. I've been agitating for a while for a bifurcation of the browser space. Give me: 1. A browser primarily oriented at CONTENT. Simple, minimal page presentation (along the lined of Readability), focusing principally on core page content. With wide margins, high contrast, and a readable font face, and the ability to manage, organize, prioritize, sort, search, and cross-reference content. 2. A browser that is a highly-interactive application engine. Essentially today's Chrome (this fits with Google's long-term interests at replacing desktop apps). We've mashed both of these under a single roof, and the fit's getting increasingly awkward. Some things that would greatly help Firefox (and Chrome for that matter): You do not need to have every tab loaded, rendered, in active memory and sucking CPU at the same time. Give priority to the foreground tab. Close out background tabs (on a least-used / highest-footprint basis) and restore them when they're navigated to. The tab-switching hit should be bought back by overall greater browser performance. Completely redesign bookmarks with thought given to workflow. The absolutely WORST UI attribute in any environment I've encountered across platforms is windows which cannot be resized, and bookmark management windows are horrible in this respect. I need MUCH more space to work with. Improve responsiveness. One of the most painful aspects is how I interact with bookmarks. I can't open my bookmarks list, left-click a folder, and select "add page here" from a menu. Why not? DO NOT REPLICATE CHROME'S PLACEMENT OF "DELETE FOLDER" IMMEDIATELY ABOVE "ADD PAGE AND FAIL TO PROVIDE A DELETION CONFIRMATION DIALOG FFS!!!!!* The existing "add page modal dialog is fucking annoying as hell* Half the time I want to refer back to the browser page itself to add information but the modal dialog blocks all browser page input. Provide a duplicate entry search and reconcilliation. Emphasize tags. They're present but poorly presented. Emphasize bookmarks for navigation. Improve annotation capabilities, including cross-referencing. Provide a decentralized sharing mechanism. I don't care for SAAS generally on privacy basis, think FreedomBox. A low-overhead means to reference a resource from which I can post/recover my bookmarks from multiple devices and browsers would be useful. Include a few lines of context from the page. Readability's "expanded* article view is excellent in this regard. Page titles almost always pretty much exactly suck. Though if you do this, provide both expanded and collapsed views. ALLOW THE BOOKMARKS LIST TO WORK AS WORKFLOWS. "Date added", "date modified", and "last viewed" would be great. An "archive" flag is also useful (promote unarchived bookmarks up, allow viewing archived bookmarks if desired). Provide the ability to download the bookmarks source in offline-readable format. Readability has the capacity to create ePub and Kindle content. Though it doesn't have a bulk-export tool (this would fucking completely absolutely rock my world). Look at eBook management tools -- Moon+Reader, Calibre, etc. These are designed with libraries of content in mind. As antipatterns, look at Adobe Reader and PDF management in general (there is none) and avoid their worse mistakes, specifically: no management of archives, no bookmarking, no annotations, fixed-form-factor rendering, craptastic search, no tagging, poor zoom, very awkward in-document navigation, no cross-referencing capabilities.
ripperdoc 13y ago
An application health dashboard should be standard practice in large software, especially software that supports plugin and interpreting code. I am sure I am not alone to feel that software get sluggish with time, or that certain updates causes a lot of crashes. A dashboard could monitor this and transparently show whether the application is working as intended, and if it's slow, show what's slowing it down. Good initative!
drill_sarge 13y ago
I recently switched from Opera to FF (beta channel) because Opera now working on webkit based browser and the current Presto-browser doesn't get any dev love beside security updates. One thing I noticed is the really slow start up time of FF and high memory consumption. Also I have the feeling it gets worse over time because when I start a new profile (even with the same addons) FF feels suddenly much more responsive, starts faster and so on. I hope this stuff can help them improve those issues.

154 points by pilgrim689 13y ago

diminoten 13y ago

> and your browser can start healing itself I wonder what some specifics are for this statement.

sp332 13y ago
One way, which is admittedly heavy-handed, is already available. If you go to Help->Troubleshooting Information, there's a button to "Reset Firefox". https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi... Hopefully future releases will automatically detect problems in individual subsystems and give you more fine-grained control.
- ubojan 13y ago
  Yup, this is currently the best and quickest way to fix problems with Firefox. If you set up sync, you can reset browser and reload context (extensions, settings, history, passwords, ...) in a few minutes.
brightghost 13y ago
Curious to see this today, as the FF enterprise mailing list has been filled with grumbling this week about FF's inability to auto-update itself or its plugins, and the headaches that causes us IT folk when paired with the auto-quarantining of outdated plugins recently implemented.
- slacka 13y ago
  I just fired up Firefox and did a help->about firefox. Guess what? I'm still on version 17! Despite all their claims about the silent auto-update feature, it doesn't work if you are running as a limited normal user account. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711475 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711475 I don't know if this is what you're talking about, but I'd don't blame the "IT folk". Seriously, what kind of idiot requires their users to run with administrator accounts for their software to function properly? What is this 2005?
DEinspanjer 13y ago
It is still a bit forward looking, but I can give you one quick "for instance": Using the data that is being collected today, we can analyze poor performance and stability and correlate it with certain extensions and plugins, going down to the level of version and platform specifics. We can then provide better blocklisting based on this data, in addition to providing the user with the tool to see the results for themselves and offer suggestions such as updating an add-on or uninstalling it.

devNoise 13y ago

Will this help them figure out that they need to fix memory leaks?

shocks 13y ago
They're already fixing memory leaks. In fact, Firefox now uses less memory than Chrome. Let me guess, you're another person who hasn't used Firefox in a few years hasn't bothered to check out the latest versions at all? :)
- esrauch 13y ago
  It is rather unfortunate that there was a couple years there that FF lagged behind Chrome, it is really still having lasting impact on the brand. That said, the developer tools (both Firebug and the newer native ones) are really just not on par with Chrome now. I know they have people working on it, so I am looking forward to what they come up with.
  - untog 13y ago
    The fact that there are both native and Firebug developer tools still baffles me- if they'd concentrated on one of the two they might be a lot more competitive with Chrome.
    - shocks 13y ago
      They're making a push to work on the native tools now. The native tools in Nightly are actually pretty usable now, though still not as advanced as Chrome. It'll come, I'm sure. :)
    - potch 13y ago
      What's baffling about it? There are the native developer tools, but add-ons can still provide developer functionality.
- rexreed 13y ago
  For me, alas, with 5 windows open and many, many tabs per window, Firefox regularly climbs into the 1 Gig+ memory range. The solution: less windows and tabs, I guess. But I was hoping / expecting the memory profile to change significantly over the past few builds. And yes, I am using the latest build, I check about:memory regularly, stripped out the unneeded add-ons, but maybe I've just got too much stuff open and those pages have lots of script activity. Is my usage the issue or is there something that can be improved in my scenario?

thomasbk 13y ago

Part of this is somewhat similar to how Windows 8 measures "Start-up impact" of applications that auto-start, and allows you to disable them with two clicks. (In task manager)

sp332 13y ago
Internet Explorer will even tell you how long each plugin takes to start. You can see the stats in [Gear icon]-> Manage Add-ons. My slowest plugin is actually Google Chrome Frame :p
- TheCraiggers 13y ago
  I'd say that, given the scope of what that plugin is doing, a slow startup is not exactly surprising, and is rather expected.

acjohnson55 13y ago

I'm not sure if this applies, but I really hope they provide better tools to identify badly behaving webpages. Sometimes when my CPU or memory are being cranked by Firefox, I really just want to kill the one tab out of 50 that's causing all the problems.

jlgreco 13y ago
It would be great if they could roll such a feature into a convenient UI. Just a magic "Firefox, whatever you are doing.. knock it off" button would be great. It could look at system memory usage and CPU usage, determine if either is high enough that it might cause user distress, and kill whatever tabs are the most likely offenders.
- BrianEatWorld 13y ago
  I like this idea. A bit like the pause buttons on my VMs. I have this type of issue more with Chrome than Firefox though and it always seems to be related to leaving a tab open with a video for a long time, even if it isn't being played.
  - progrock 13y ago
    At least with Chrome there is the built in Task Manager.
    - ianox 13y ago
      > At least with Chrome there is the built in Task Manager. And the about:memory page, which shows you memory usage of all your extensions too.
    - bad_user 13y ago
      I'd love for Firefox to have a task manager like that.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

Goronmon 13y ago

Funnily enough, Firefox died on my system today and I haven't been able to get it working since. Just freezes after start up, even in safe mode (well, when it even booted up, which it stopped doing after a couple tries).

vanderZwan 13y ago
On my computer it sometimes doesn't open a window unless I open a second instance of Firefox, and then both suddenly load. Try that maybe?
- Goronmon 13y ago
  Doesn't really matter if it loads, because it just crashes anyways, haha.
- piyush_soni 13y ago
  That second 'instance' (it actually keeps only one instance running) might not be helping in bringing up your windows. Try clearing your (startup/local) cache, it might have become really big. I do that whenever my Firefox takes long times to start - if you check in Process Monitor, at that time it is dealing with those cache folders.
  - vanderZwan 13y ago
    I dunno, I just noticed it "pops" up as soon as I try to start it again. Note that this is the first start I'm talking about. I'll try that cache cleaning.
rythie 13y ago
Your sqlite files might be locked - try either removing or moving them and copying them back.
- Goronmon 13y ago
  I made a token gesture at fixing the sqlite files, but I don't have the patience to manipulate obscure files in AppData to get a browser to work. Stuff like this is why Chrome is my primary browser.

hollerith 13y ago

I wish one of the most important tools for publishing and consuming text on the internet weren't so prone to problems as to require a dedicated health-reporting subsystem. My text editor and my email client don't need dedicated health-reporting subsystems.

option_greek 13y ago
You surely must not be using Outlook that suffers from morbid obesity.
scott_s 13y ago
Your text editor and email client aren't also capable of running arbitrary applications. Modern web browsers have more in common with operating systems than with text editors and email clients.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- hollerith 13y ago
  >Modern web browsers have more in common with operating systems than with text editors and email clients. That is the core of the problem right there. The need for a new health-reporting system is just a symptom or a consequence.
  - scott_s 13y ago
    I rather like this fact. It allows things like GMail, YouTube and the fantastic work I see on the NY Times.
    - hollerith 13y ago
      I wish you could have your GMail, YouTube, etc, and I could have a way to use the internet to access a wide variety of writings without my having to deal with a system so complicated or unreliable that users are being invited to learn a new health-monitoring subsystem for it. ADDED. An argument can be made that my operating system is already a system so complicated or unreliable that it requires its own specialized health-monitoring subsystem (of which Unix commands ps, free and top and OS X's Activity Monitor are a part). My response is that I resent having to deal with two such systems instead of only one.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

olympus 13y ago

It looks like the Mozilla team is doing such great stuff nowadays. I converted to Chrome a few years back and it seemed like Firefox was stagnant. But I think the competition has been good for them, they've been doing lots of neat stuff recently. I'm thinking about switching back, or figuring out a way to use two different browsers.

com2kid 13y ago

My single largest issue with Firefox stability is constantly running into the 32bit memory barrier. Either split tabs out into multiple processes, or enable 64bit support already. My browser crashes on average twice a day due to running out of memory and FF just giving up. It doesn't even crash gracefully, it just up and quits. (I frequently have ~100 tabs open, and I am quite thankful that Firefox lets me search across my tabs! Very useful feature)

thefreeman 13y ago
I really can't understand how many people consistently talk about having hundreds of tabs open. What are you so afraid of closing a website for? If it's that important, you will remember to go back to it later. Usually, it's not. Once I get to 10 or 15 tabs I usually end up closing all but one or two just to stay focused.
- com2kid 13y ago
  > I really can't understand how many people consistently talk about having hundreds of tabs open. What are you so afraid of closing a website for? If it's that important, you will remember to go back to it later. Usually, it's not. Well the hacker news homepage for instance. I typically go down and middle click on any story I find interesting, and the comments section to go with it. This can easily end up with 8-14 tabs open. Now repeat the same thing for my Reddit frontpage (or just /r/programming!) and I can easily hit another 30 tabs within a couple of minutes. Every URL someone posts in the comments that seems interesting also gets opened in a new tab. An active discussion easily results in another 5-10 tabs (and remember, that is per discussion thread!). If one of those tabs goes to Wikipedia, then I'll middle click any links in the Wikipedia article that sound relevant. This can add another 10 tabs easily. Within 10 minutes of turning on my computer I am now easily up to 50+ tabs.
  - progrock 13y ago
    I understand how easy that is to do. But when do you have the time to read them? Part of the fun of the web, is getting a little lost in it. But I totally loose focus. Have you ever tried limiting yourself to one window and the judicious use of the back button?

dredmorbius 13y ago

My observations, using both Firefox (well, Iceweasel 20.0-1~bpo60+1), and Chrome (Chromium 26.0.1410.43-1). In many ways, I prefer Firefox as a browser (better plugins, controls, tabs, too much Google influence already). My Firefox experience is getting to the point it's virtually unusable, with very, very slow response to any actions (especially new tab / new window functions). We're talking about many seconds, sometimes a minute or more. While the overall footprint of Firefox is smaller than Chrome, Chrome's sandboxing of tabs gives vastly better user-based memory management: I've got the option of killing off tabs (without closing them) that are using excessive memory, restoring net system responsiveness. Firefox uses a single process space, and slowness in one tab seems to extend elsewhere (my general observation, not based on analysis). A larger part of the problem is a combination of how browsers facilitate (or don't) content management and browsing as a task and workflow, and the increasing emphasis on highly-interactive sites. The lack of such tools, and especially the paucity of bookmarks as a management tool, means that my usual workflow management is: - Open browser. - Open lots of tabs. It's not uncommon for me to have 100s of tabs open across multiple browser windows. For Firefox, Tree Style Tabs at least give some semblance of structure as to how I've traced down some link path. The flat horizontal tabs of Chrome absolutely suck in this regard. Having a better way to navigate the tabspace would help greatly. What I've recently discovered, and what's radically changing my use of the Web, is Readability (Instapaper and Pocket are similar services). It's amazing. I've written a bit about this at Google+: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/PhQR421etdT https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/PhQR421e... https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/fVK7aJuBT5Q https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/fVK7aJuB... Readability solves three problems: It renders web pages viewable. Far, far, far too many websites have designs which are overtly hostile to actually reading content (even HN, to some degree). Even those which are readable are far too distracting in the present ad-driven eyeball economy. It manages my reading list. Rather than opening content in tabs, I append it to my reading list. Readability also offers tags (though limited to 500 per user, a wall I hit 2 days in) to help organize content (Firefox offers these for bookmarks, Chrome does not). And the reading list is available across different browsers and devices (I'm not usually a fan of sharing personal information, least of all my reading interests, through a service, but in this case the convenience factor wins out). Both of these factors could be addressed, somewhat, in a browser. I've been agitating for a while for a bifurcation of the browser space. Give me: 1. A browser primarily oriented at CONTENT. Simple, minimal page presentation (along the lined of Readability), focusing principally on core page content. With wide margins, high contrast, and a readable font face, and the ability to manage, organize, prioritize, sort, search, and cross-reference content. 2. A browser that is a highly-interactive application engine. Essentially today's Chrome (this fits with Google's long-term interests at replacing desktop apps). We've mashed both of these under a single roof, and the fit's getting increasingly awkward. Some things that would greatly help Firefox (and Chrome for that matter): You do not need to have every tab loaded, rendered, in active memory and sucking CPU at the same time. Give priority to the foreground tab. Close out background tabs (on a least-used / highest-footprint basis) and restore them when they're navigated to. The tab-switching hit should be bought back by overall greater browser performance. Completely redesign bookmarks with thought given to workflow. The absolutely WORST UI attribute in any environment I've encountered across platforms is windows which cannot be resized, and bookmark management windows are horrible in this respect. I need MUCH more space to work with. Improve responsiveness. One of the most painful aspects is how I interact with bookmarks. I can't open my bookmarks list, left-click a folder, and select "add page here" from a menu. Why not? DO NOT REPLICATE CHROME'S PLACEMENT OF "DELETE FOLDER" IMMEDIATELY ABOVE "ADD PAGE AND FAIL TO PROVIDE A DELETION CONFIRMATION DIALOG FFS!!!!!* The existing "add page modal dialog is fucking annoying as hell* Half the time I want to refer back to the browser page itself to add information but the modal dialog blocks all browser page input. Provide a duplicate entry search and reconcilliation. Emphasize tags. They're present but poorly presented. Emphasize bookmarks for navigation. Improve annotation capabilities, including cross-referencing. Provide a decentralized sharing mechanism. I don't care for SAAS generally on privacy basis, think FreedomBox. A low-overhead means to reference a resource from which I can post/recover my bookmarks from multiple devices and browsers would be useful. Include a few lines of context from the page. Readability's "expanded* article view is excellent in this regard. Page titles almost always pretty much exactly suck. Though if you do this, provide both expanded and collapsed views. ALLOW THE BOOKMARKS LIST TO WORK AS WORKFLOWS. "Date added", "date modified", and "last viewed" would be great. An "archive" flag is also useful (promote unarchived bookmarks up, allow viewing archived bookmarks if desired). Provide the ability to download the bookmarks source in offline-readable format. Readability has the capacity to create ePub and Kindle content. Though it doesn't have a bulk-export tool (this would fucking completely absolutely rock my world). Look at eBook management tools -- Moon+Reader, Calibre, etc. These are designed with libraries of content in mind. As antipatterns, look at Adobe Reader and PDF management in general (there is none) and avoid their worse mistakes, specifically: no management of archives, no bookmarking, no annotations, fixed-form-factor rendering, craptastic search, no tagging, poor zoom, very awkward in-document navigation, no cross-referencing capabilities.

ripperdoc 13y ago

An application health dashboard should be standard practice in large software, especially software that supports plugin and interpreting code. I am sure I am not alone to feel that software get sluggish with time, or that certain updates causes a lot of crashes. A dashboard could monitor this and transparently show whether the application is working as intended, and if it's slow, show what's slowing it down. Good initative!

drill_sarge 13y ago

I recently switched from Opera to FF (beta channel) because Opera now working on webkit based browser and the current Presto-browser doesn't get any dev love beside security updates. One thing I noticed is the really slow start up time of FF and high memory consumption. Also I have the feeling it gets worse over time because when I start a new profile (even with the same addons) FF feels suddenly much more responsive, starts faster and so on. I hope this stuff can help them improve those issues.