Comparing Memory Usage of Firefox 2 vs 3 402
DaMan writes "ZDNet picks up on yesterday's Firefox 3 beta 1 review by comparing the memory usage of Firefox 2 against the latest beta. The results from one of the tests is quite interesting, after loading 12 pages and waiting 5 minutes, 2 used 103,180KB and 3 used 62,312KB. IE used 89,756KB.""
not to point out the obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
btw i did same test in IE7 and Opera9 and only got 30-40MB usage
Re:And Opera (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Strange, 1p/10 mins more than 12pp/5 mins? (Score:5, Insightful)
not an issue (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How are they measuring? (Score:5, Insightful)
Task Manager sucks, use Sysinternals' Process Explorer.
Re:not to point out the obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
last i checked it was plugin writers who were blamed for all the memory issues by Mozilla
Which to me sounds eerily similar to Microsoft blaming 3rd party software for taking down the operating system.
Re:And Opera (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually something of interest I've noticed is that since I got NoScript my FF ram usage has dropped considerably. I rarely get about 83MB with FF2 now, because it doesn't have to load the plugins and such.
Re:And Opera (Score:5, Insightful)
Even then it still needs a dynamic layout for CSS and scripting on the fly. And even then some scripting is safe, some is not, so there are rules that the code has to implement like pop-up blockers, password managers, warnings on insecure pages, warnings on cross-site scripting, etc. All that and the browsers STILL need to be able to sensibly parse and display completely borked pages with invalid HTML.
Nevermind maintaining history, cache, cookies, referring pages, bookmarks.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
What a stupid "test" (Score:4, Insightful)
I bet if he re-clicked on each of the 12 tabs after the 5 minutes was up, that memory usages would go back up again.
"using less memory" isnt always desirable. I have 4 GB of RAM in my system and i'd rather if the applications USED THAT RAM, to keep application response "instant", rather than un-caching stuff, only to pull it back into memory again when I want to see it.
Re:not to point out the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Another point regarding your IE7 and Opera9 tests: as far as I know, all modern browsers choose to allocate more or less memory depending on how much memory the OS reports as available (certainly Firefox does), so users on different boxes can show very different results.
Re:This is irrelevant (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How are they measuring? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And Opera (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How are they measuring? (Score:3, Insightful)
Meta (Score:2, Insightful)
sounds like a poorly written extension (Score:3, Insightful)
Alternatively, you could use Opera.
Memory is not as important as Stability! (Score:3, Insightful)
CPU utilization where the browser all of a sudden is sucking down 100% of your CPU or of a single core and/or crashes are just as important (or more). More than likely the memory leaks have related browser stability issues that can be addressed with single fixes but if the browser continues to have runaway CPU issues and crashes it will not matter HOW small a footprint of memory it uses.
Re:Meta (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And Opera (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to browse the web on a machine with 8 MB of RAM. Total, including the OS. At the time, real time decoding of a JPEG was extremely difficult, but my current CPU has 100 times the clock speed and is 64 bit and has vector processing features. Yet, browsers still seem to make the same class of CPU-memory tradeoffs that made sense on a 68030. For example, I may have ten tabs open in a window. I can only see one of them at any given moment, but the fully decoded images are all sitting in memory for all ten web pages, despite the fact that the page could be re-rendered almost instantly on a modern system.
Since browsing a few web pages is seldom the only thing I do with my computer, I go and do other stuff in Lightwave, Blender, Photoshop, whatever, then I come back to my web browser, and I wait while the whole working set gets swapped back in. Then, I click on the tab I want, and I wait while the working set for that tab gets swapped back in. If it just rerendered the page from the original bits, rather than using cached decoded images sucking up RAM and whatnot, it'd have almost nothing to reload and worst case performance would be orders of magnitude better. Hooray for "optimisation!"
Oh, and can we get some ninjas to fucking kill Flash. Seriously, I shouldn't need a bunch of script blocking and flash blocking extensions just to be able to browse the fucking intarwebs without having a seizure.
Re:And Opera (Score:3, Insightful)
No, I don't have Flash at all, yet Moz is just as much of a resource hog.
I use NoScript, so no Javascript in-use here 99% of the time, either...
A pop-up blocker is a passive device, simply refusing to execute certain code, it saves CPU time, not the other way around. Similar for pointless warnings about page contents.
And again, I have the password manager disabled, so it should not be using any resources.
Point me to the "borked pages" code, and I'll be damn happy to remove it, if it will give a huge performance boost. No question.
Although it doesn't handle javascript (which I disable with Moz anyhow), Dillo does basically everything you've described, using a fraction as much memory.
Right now, with the same 3 tabs open, Dillo is using 1/5th the memory of FF2.0.0.9, and that's just for starters. The performance disparity is much larger... Much of the time, the next page will be loaded just about the instant I finish clicking on the link. It's like the difference between night and day.
The real shame of it is that the Dillo project is on hold now, even though with the tiniest fraction of the resources of the Mozilla project, it could very quickly become an absolutely amazing web browser. It's really the same thing that happened with Links-GUI... Two amazingly promising browsers, going nowhere.
Don't take it anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't see that memory usage remains a problem for most users. It's just the vocal few who are having memory problems. The main problem is that these users assume this is part of the "normal" experience of using Firefox, so they complain that every user must also be seeing the same thing. They take no steps to fix or report their problems, as they consider the problem to be "well-known" and think developers must be idiots for not being able to see it.
If you're still having serious problems with Firefox, try creating a new profile [mozillazine.org] and installing the Firefox 3 Beta [mozilla.com]. If you still have problems, discuss them on the MozillaZine Builds forum [mozillazine.org]. If the problems do not get resolved, just switch to another browser. It's not normal to experience serious problems when browsing, so I don't see why anyone accepts it as part of the "normal" experience.
I agree that the damage to Firefox's reputation is already done. I've found that no matter how many reports come out that Firefox doesn't have a severe and obvious memory problem, the few reports that show a problem are the ones that become popular. If any of them just included instructions to reproduce the problem on other computers, those reports would be productive. Somehow, they always seem to leave that part out.
Re:And Opera (Score:4, Insightful)
What we really need is a mechanism for e.g. Firefox to use large amounts of memory to speed up page loading when there's plenty of memory, but to optimize for a small memory footprint when I've got ten zillion Gimp windows and Picasa open.
Why should Firefox behave in exactly the same way in two totally different situations?
Efficient Firefox? Finally! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yes, but... looking in the wrong spot! :) (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And Opera (Score:3, Insightful)
But a browser doesn't just browse web pages. A browser is a limited form operating system, as it has an execution language (Javascript) and environment (the DOM). A mail client is relatively simple as it's just a texty protocol. A browser is HTML + XML + CSS + HTTP/S + JPG/PNG/GIF/etc renderers + embedded plugins + caches, and in case of FF, it has XPCOM and various other extensible subsystems.
Re:And Opera (Score:3, Insightful)
The raw web data transfered for those pages couldn't be more than 10MB, why do they need 60MB?
Do you think that DOM editing of the document tree, for example, should be implemented by actually editing the raw data gotten from the web? Or, for another example, when you double click on a web page, how do you think the word on which the clicked happened is found in the document? I guess you are imagining that the whole document is reparsed, the placement on screen for every single thing is recomputed, reflowed and so on, and then the word in the click coordinates is found? Have you not considered that web browsers developers decided an age ago to do some caching? Don't you imagine that that caching might take more memory that the raw data? Have you even considered the reasonability of what you are asking? How is it on earth that you see yourself as fit to make browser design suggestions?
Of course, I'd love to see how a browser designed according to your ideas has to uncompress every image on a web page each time the user moves the scrollbar a pixel down.
Re:Firefox Memory Leaks, C++ Memory Leaks (Score:3, Insightful)