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Mozilla Advertising Bug Firefox

Mozilla Fixed a 14-Year-Old Bug In Firefox, Now Adblock Plus Uses Less Memory 410

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla launched Firefox 41 yesterday. Today, Adblock Plus confirmed the update "massively improves" the memory usage of its Firefox add-on. This particular memory issue was brought up in May 2014 by Mozilla and by Adblock Plus. But one of the bugs that contributed to the problem was actually first reported on Bugzilla in April 2001 (bug 77999).
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Mozilla Fixed a 14-Year-Old Bug In Firefox, Now Adblock Plus Uses Less Memory

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  • Why use ABP (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24, 2015 @02:23PM (#50591433)

    When you can use ublock Origin, which uses even less ram.

  • Nice! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Now I can not only block the Kardashians but also Donald Trump and Taylor Swift.

  • Other bugs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Thursday September 24, 2015 @02:27PM (#50591469) Homepage Journal

    When will they fix the bug that's slowly turning Firefox into a crappy clone of Chrome?

    • Re:Other bugs (Score:5, Interesting)

      by lister king of smeg ( 2481612 ) on Thursday September 24, 2015 @02:52PM (#50591683)

      When will they fix the bug that's slowly turning Firefox into a crappy clone of Chrome?

      I think that particular cancer has it has gone malignant and spread to far already. I think I am going to jump ship to sea-monkey if this keeps up, I mean, I already use Firefox and Thunderbird, and they have crammed webIDE into Firefox anyway so I may as well have it all in one piece. I will probably wait for my biannual OS version bump, But that may change to now too, as Ubuntu has jumped aboard the systemD titanic on the next LTS version.

      Is is just me or has the whole software world lost its mind.

      Windows is trying to go full panopticon and you pay a subscription for it.
      Linux distros are going batshit crazy and slapping a tablet UI on desktops and putting immature, kitchen sink crap-ware as their init
      android is trying to kill external storage as unlimited dataplans are killed off.
      Mobile has killed the idea of fallowing open standards and you need separate apps for every network so you can talk to everyone Skype, face book messenger, google hangouts/voice/chat/mail/talk, snap-chat, whatsapp, ... when previously I could just use pidgin and talk to everyone.
      Cloud storage everything, when storage has never been cheaper.
      And Mozilla's insanity from lets clone chrome to making Firefox a catch all when it was meant to be just the browser, and wasting resources on building their own os.

      what the hell.

      • Re:Other bugs (Score:5, Insightful)

        by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Thursday September 24, 2015 @03:08PM (#50591809) Homepage

        what the hell.

        Monetization. Ad revenue. Analytics. Corporate branding. Vendor lock-in. Cloud services. Walled gardens. Subscriptions.

        Absolutely the software world has lost its mind. The software isn't the point any more; all this other crap is.

        I've lost track of how many apps I've now uninstalled because they do NOTHING you can't access with a browser. But the apps want to embed themselves so they can access your data.

        • by H3lldr0p ( 40304 )

          What I want to know is what these companies will do once they have the data. AFAICT it's like the underwear gnomes.

          1) Get the data
          2) ????
          3) Profit!

          So you sell the data to an aggregator. What if they've already have the data? What then? What happens when our lives are so well integrated into these feedback systems that no one wants the data anymore? Or that the data is so close to worthless it doesn't matter?

      • Re:Other bugs (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anna Merikin ( 529843 ) on Thursday September 24, 2015 @03:16PM (#50591869) Journal

        Aaah, I can tell you're a young one.... 'Tis the sign of another tech bubble, all of it. It's a replay of 1997-2000, but in a different mix. Now, google plays the part of Microsoft; Mozilla is alter-Netscape, trying to catch up; and Girls is Bizarro-Friends.

        As Mark Twain famously said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."

      • Mobile has killed the idea of fallowing open standards and you need separate apps for every network so you can talk to everyone Skype, face book messenger, google hangouts/voice/chat/mail/talk, snap-chat, whatsapp, ... when previously I could just use pidgin and talk to everyone.

        I solved this issue by refusing to 'chat' with anyone I can't reach outside of Hangouts, via either SMS or actual Hangouts messages. If someone in my already smallish circle of friends / family / acquaintances doesn't want to accommodate, then I don't need to talk to them outside of face-to-face conversations...

        That said, I do prefer Hangouts messages, since they work regardless of whether I'm on cellular data or some sort of WiFi connection.

      • by lgw ( 121541 )

        It's not just you.

        Of all your rant, though, cloud storage is actually a legitimate convenience feature for many users, who don't otherwise have a handy way of sharing/syncing stuff between various devices.

        But, yeah, almost everything seems to be going to shit for no good reason. I need to learn to be productive on BSD now - it seems to be the only place the crazy hasn't infected.

      • Re:Other bugs (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Lennie ( 16154 ) on Thursday September 24, 2015 @04:57PM (#50592591)

        Why would you single out software ?

        The whole world has lost their mind (with the US being one of the countries at the front).

        Let's take the economy as an example.

        You think this interest rate is normal ?:
        http://www.tradingeconomics.co... [tradingeconomics.com]

        You think quantitative easing is the new normal ?

        Even if you agree that these are necessary measures you'd have to agree they should only be temporarily.

        • You think quantitative easing is the new normal ?

          How could that possibly be avoided? Real economy works in terms of supply and demand. When demand exceeds supply, companies hire more people and we have an economic boom; when supply exceeds demand, people get fired and we have a depression. However, most people get their income in the form of wages, and wages have been falling for decades now, thus the demand necessary to keep the economy going simply isn't there anymore. The only fix would be to force thos

        • You think quantitative easing is the new normal ? ...you'd have to agree they should only be temporarily.

          They're just as temporary as the patches *I* create. Until they blow up, and then they get a new temporary patch.

          Than again, maybe Janet Yellen herself is temporary: one [reuters.com], Two [youtube.com]

          When I watched two, at first I thought she had gotten stage fright, then I decided she was just trying to concentrate or breathe.

      • Relax, it's you.

        - The "systemd Titanic" has dozens of blog posts by Poettering and others explaining all of the design decisions behind it, and I can't fault anything. I've been using it since I switched to Fedora 18 from Ubuntu, and I never had a problem. git has dozen more complex integrated features in it than CVS, and I don't see anyone crying about that. I really don't understand the hatred. Do you want ext2 back, too? How about Linux kernel 2.2? Perl 4? Want to ditch vim and Emacs because they
      • Linux distros are going batshit crazy and slapping a tablet UI on desktops

        Then use a different UI. There's loads of choice that isn't tablet-like, including xfce, Mate, and even KDE is still safe.

    • by alexhs ( 877055 )

      When will they fix the bug that's slowly turning Firefox into a crappy clone of Chrome?

      As soon as they get their financial independence. They're working on it, by the way, there was a deal with Yahoo earlier this year.

    • Mozilla fixed this back in 2005. It's called SeaMonkey [seamonkey-project.org].
      • But is there an RPM for it?

        • Of course; it's packaged in the usual repositories of major GNU/Linux distributions. Just type sudo zypper in seamonkey or sudo yum install seamonkey or whatever the magic words are for your flavour.
      • Seamonkey + NoScript + Don't load images. Never been happier.

      • Why would I want my email, browser, and calendar all in one app?
        • So don't use the e-mail and calendar part. (If you don't set them as the default applications, you'll never notice them.) Even though they're sitting there unused and unnoticed, SeaMonkey is still less bloated than Firefox.
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by edxwelch ( 600979 )

      That's why I use Pale Moon - which is basically the Firefox UI as it was 5 years ago, but with all the latest core updates.

  • Using Firefox has become like that relationship that used to be perfect and then out of nowhere your partner starts cheating on you and each time swears its going to be the last time.

    And you keep falling for it.

  • New Tab (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nmb3000 ( 741169 ) on Thursday September 24, 2015 @02:41PM (#50591577) Journal

    Firefox 41 also removed the New Tab URL preference (browser.newtab.url) [mozilla.org], telling people to use a third-party extension instead.

    The reason? Malware can change the setting. Full stop. That's it. So, because someone's computer is already compromised, and that malware changed a Firefox preference (alongside doing things like, you know, running a keylogger), Mozilla decided to cause headache and grief for everyone else. And to top it all off, if you want to continue to configure the new tab URL, you should use an extension written by some random guy.

    I just don't understand the mentality. Choosing the default URL for a new tab seems like such an obvious feature, yet it's getting ripped out too, like so many others that Gavin Sharp has pissed on. Fuck Mozilla.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They also refuse to honor JPG rotation, because it might break the internet, without bothering to check and see if properly following the standard would make things better or worse.
    • That's been Mozilla's method lately. They decide what they want for the browser, and not the used, which is why there was a lot of customization removed from the browser. Their only excuse is to use an extension, in which needs to be signed by them. I am starting to think that most browsers are just moving to the casual user and making them dumb-down and not caring for any poweruser. I mean, Opera did the same thing, dropped their code and just making a worthless browser based on chromium, losing all of
      • They decide what they want for the browser, and not the used

        LOL ... Freudian slip, or innocent typo?

        These days, I'd say users are feeling pretty used.

    • Wow.

      That's just plain retarded. But then again i'm not surprised.

      Mozilla has a long history of not knowing what the fuck they are doing. i.e. Denial over memory leaks has been going on since FF 2.x

      • by roca ( 43122 )

        Well, apart from the fact that we spent years fixing leaks and usually have the best memory usage of any browser.

    • by dissy ( 172727 )

      I just don't understand the mentality.

      It's just one more step in their grand master plan to remove all web browsing functionality from their web browser, announced back in April '15.

      They already approved their decision to remove HTTP support from Firefox over the next year:
      https://blog.mozilla.org/secur... [mozilla.org]

      After which the new tab preference will be pretty unimportant in the overall scheme of things.
      Although to be fair, they will force-expire that random guys plugin a few dozen times between now and then no doubt :P

      • Wow. As if Mozilla couldn't get any more stupid.

        I love that Tim Berners-Lee called them out on their bullshit:

        * Web Security - "HTTPS Everywhere" harmful [w3.org]

        And Andrea Ronchetti gives perfect use case that this retarded move would break:

        But if i want to see an html page which is saved in my hard disk, can i do it? And with software as EasyPhp there will be some problems?

    • Re:New Tab (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Thursday September 24, 2015 @07:58PM (#50593621) Homepage

      I just don't understand the mentality.

      The mentality is that you can and should build your own franken-browser from whatever plug-ins fits you, it's not supposed to be a fully functional browser you can extend but more like a skeleton you can build on. It happens when you go over the top on flexibility and think people want a DIY kit instead of a product. The problem is the same as why you can't fit any car body with any chassis with any engine with any transmission with any brakes with any interior, they don't all go together. And some parts are shit, but only by hogging memory or crashing in ways that aren't easily traceable. I don't want to be the unit and integration tester in a modern day DLL hell, because Mozilla's will not take any responsibility for plug-ins trampling over each other or bringing the browser to its knees. Don't get me wrong, the basic idea that you can write an obscure plug-in without bloating the main code base and getting approval to push it out to 100+ million users is great. But it should be more of a test bed to see what functionality should be standard for the masses, rather than pushing more and more functionality out of the core. Here's an early alpha of Firefox 100, you can have HTML engine plugins, Javascript engine plugins, UI plugins, in fact any functionality you'd care to think of. It looks like this:

      main()
      {
              loadPlugins()
      }

      Great, yes?

    • It's so cute how you think that the reason to eliminate the webpage for a new tab, isn't because they're now serving ads on and making money from "empty" pages.

    • by roca ( 43122 )

      We have to live in the real world where a significant percentage of users have some kind of malware or quasi-malware (e.g. Ask toolbar or anti-virus software) installed.

  • It's not a bug (Score:5, Informative)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Thursday September 24, 2015 @02:50PM (#50591663) Journal
    AFAICT it's not a bug, more of a feature request.
    The problem was that style sheets were not being shared between pages, even if they were identical. So AdBlockPro had a copy of its style sheets shared in each tab. Apparently it uses a large style sheet?

    So this change allowed for some de-duplication.
    • With the default filterset (EasyList), it uses a 40,000 line stylesheet. It took about 3 MB per tab (or actually, worse: 3 MB per document, so every iframe used another 3 MB).

      I can't imagine that matching all those rules against the page as it loads is particularly fast either...

      • I can't imagine that matching all those rules against the page as it loads is particularly fast either...

        I think you're probably right, but compared to actually loading the ads, it seems to be an order of magnitude faster.

  • There is hope yet for all the bugs I've submitted.

  • What? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by OverlordQ ( 264228 ) on Thursday September 24, 2015 @03:01PM (#50591761) Journal

    I thought Firefox didn't have any memory issues? That was the party line from Mozilla for so long.

  • 14 year old bug huh? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Well, way to go Firefox! Right on top of things! But I thought Firefox has been saying for years it has no memory issues? So is this a 14 year old issue that really isn't an issue that now has been fixed? Got it.

    • Well, way to go Firefox! Right on top of things! But I thought Firefox has been saying for years it has no memory issues? So is this a 14 year old issue that really isn't an issue that now has been fixed? Got it.

      Shhhhh, don't mess with Firefox's "we're lean and mean" narrative.

      • by roca ( 43122 )

        We are relatively lean and mean compared to other browsers, but that doesn't mean "no memory issues", of course. So enough with the straw men.

        • by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Thursday September 24, 2015 @11:53PM (#50594541) Journal

          We are relatively lean and mean compared to other browsers, but that doesn't mean "no memory issues", of course. So enough with the straw men.

          FF used to be lean and mean, but honestly, there is no way I can say that with a straight face now. I still like FF, but with all the crap packed into it by default, "lean and mean" just doesn't apply.

          Is it still the best browser out there? Maybe, but I feel it's gone downhill in the last 10 ~20 releases. There's no denying it, and this bullshit memory issue has been plaguing for a long, long time.

          • by Malc ( 1751 )

            Memory consumption and monolithic process drove me off to Chrome and Safari years ago. I see the Electrolysis project is now targeting the end of the year, but I'm not going to hold my breath considering how long they've been promising it.

  • Memory hog (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Thursday September 24, 2015 @05:13PM (#50592713) Journal

    After a few hours of use with, say, ~10 tabs open, Firefox 40.0.3 leaks memory until it's using 2.6G of RAM, at which point it randomly stops loading images, gets very, very laggy, and freezes for ~30 seconds at a time.

    I hope this fixes that (I fail to see how it could make it any worse, frankly).

    • by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

      I had a problem the last time I was streaming video. There was a gap of several seconds between each item in the playlist, for reasons I could not discern. I had copied everything to a local drive (not pulling it from the NAS box) ahead of time for this exact reason, yet here it was doing it.

      It turned out to be the browser -- 64-bit Pale Moon in this particular case -- using 6.5 GB of RAM, making my machine thrash swap (I have 8 GB). Now I know to close and re-start the browser before streaming if it has be

      • I have 6G installed and everything was fine up until Firefox 30 or so.....then it all started to become sucktastically bad.

        • by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

          I suppose I should put a time frame on this so people have some idea what era of Pale Moon build I'm discussing. My swap-thrash incident is a whopping 13 days old now. I was streaming to ConnectCast at the time, and getting more than my usual number of decompression burps (where everything goes gray or green until the next keyframe), but didn't think to suspect the browser until I loaded up Task Manager in desperation.

          I have a feeling it wouldn't have made that much difference if I had 16 GB of RAM rather t

  • by ArsenneLupin ( 766289 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @02:49AM (#50595067)
    ... all the other 14-20 year old bugs.

    Any idea why it took them so long?

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