Why Firefox frustrates me

[yendi]

11% CPU usage is bad enough, but that at least fluctuates and can go down. 2.5GB of virtual memory? Fuck no. And nearly 400MB of real memory? Motherfucking no.

I love a lot of what Firefox offers, but it leaks memory like nobody's business.

And yes, I don't doubt that Google Reader and GMail contribute, as do any sites that run Flash (I keep Java turned off, as no site needs to even think about running Java apps without my permission, thank you very much; otherwise, I think I'd be at 4GB of vm usage). But we live in a Web 2.0 world; if the browser can't keep up, that's a problem, no matter how fast it can render a page of html.

Comments

[fiddledragon]

have you gone into about:config to turn down memory settings at all?

[yendi]

Oh, I've tweaked it like crazy, hitting every site that had suggestions.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Youch. I have a similar problem under windows, but my memory usage almost never goes above 250Mb or so.

How long do you let it run without restarting it?

[yendi]

I restart it about once a day. The "Bookmark all tabs" at least makes this a little more tolerable.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Wow. I wonder what you're using that I'm not that is making that much difference?

I did turn off in-memory caching because my workstation here hasn't really got enough memory for my IDE. Maybe that's where the big leak is.

[cedear.livejournal.com]

Er, "Bookmark all tabs"? Do you not have Startup set to "Show my windows and tabs from last time" (http://www.firefoxtutor.com/70/session-restore-is-built-into-firefox-2/)? And that's without a session manager add-on.

I use Opera, which had tabs and session restore before anything else, and haven't lost a browsing session in years.

On the main subject, I'm surprised these (http://pavlovdotnet.wordpress.com/2007/11/10/memory-fragmentation/) haven't (http://pavlovdotnet.wordpress.com/2007/11/14/leaks-memory-we-never-forgot-about-you/) been posted yet.

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

Opera rocks the pants off of every other browser (and mail client, and news client, and RSS reader) out there, but I've found it's got a memory leak, too. I had thought it rather severe, but it seems it's slower and gentler than Firefox's one, so I'm going to stop being concerned about it.

[crwilley.livejournal.com]

That's one of my pet peeves lately. At work (admittedly on an old version - Mozilla 1.7.2 - but the alternative is IE5, which won't even run LJ properly these days...), there's one particular message board where I can watch the memory usage climb, and climb, and climb, and climb; if I'm really actively reading, Firefox will crash after about 3 hours because it's eaten up all the virtual memory.

I'd blamed it on the site - which I'm sure contributes - but yeah, the browser needs to be able to keep up with the user's demands.

[yendi]

I'm actually almost glad to hear that the 1.x cycle still has issues; I prefer 2, but I'd downgrade if it made things better.

Still, they need to get their act together stat.

[crwilley.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this is a "still" - this version's from 2004. My computer hasn't been updated in that long, and the IT department won't do it because I'm supposed to be getting a thin client terminal "really soon"....which translates from City of Detroit-ese as "sometime before I retire". :|

[yendi]

Ah, yes. That's exactly the same timeframe in which I'm supposed to get a newer laptop at work. :-)

[luis-mw.livejournal.com]

I have noticed that the CPU usage is mostly affected by the presence of animated graphics, which is a real pain at most sites seem to be incapable of surviving without fancy moving GIFs

[yendi]

I tend to kill animated gifs whenever I can, but I've found that they've gotten more rare recently (as flash and other options seem to be the preferred option, once you get past the realm of LJ icons).

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

More Opera pimpage...

In Opera, you can selectively enable and disable image-loading, GIF animation, Flash, Javascript and Java on a per-site basis with a couple of mouse-clicks -- even less if you drag the relevant controls to your toolbar.

[yendi]

I'd resisted Opera for a while, as the Mac version has historically lagged behind the other ones, but I did download and install the latest beta. It seems nice so far, although I'm probably not going to decide for sure between Safari/Opera/OmniWeb until I've used them all for a few weeks.

[litch.livejournal.com]

My firefox iterations rarely ever run up that much memory, it still uses more memory than I would like but not that high. Currently my memory usage is 170m and my vm size is 190m and that's pretty typical on most machines I use (though I have a lot fewer tabs open than I recall you tending towards (currently 10).

I regularly will leave firefox open with dozens of tabs for days at a time with out much problem.

There were some memory holes fixed in the most recent couple of builds, you are using 2.0.0.9 right?

[yendi]

I'm on the latest version (and have operated with fewer than a dozen tabs in the last few days). It's definitely a leak.

[moop2000.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know what you mean. I use Safari on my macs, but at work on my Vista machine, Firefox will do the same thing! It will easily suck down a couple hundred meg of memory. Oh well.

[yendi]

I'm seriously contemplating going back to Safari if v3 is solid.

[texmorgan.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you pointed this out, mine has climbed from 86MB to 100MB in just the past 10 minutes or so. I think it might be time for me to switch browsers possibly to Opera or one of the others that Linux comes with that is more efficient.

[yendi]

Once the new year hits, I'm going to do a serious reevaluation of my browsers. If Safari 3 is out of beta and stable, I could well switch back. Ditto if Opera offers a decent forms autofill feature.

[digriz.livejournal.com]

Just don't try to report it to the Firefox developers. Apparently, their standard response is either "That's never happened to us; you must have something setup wrong" or "Oh, that's because *insert bogus techie-sounding answer*, and it's not really a bug, it's supposed to do that". (I don't doubt that certain extensions, or certain combinations of extensions, make the problem worse, but I've had enough issues with a plain-jane install to convince me the browser is fundamentally broken somewhere.)

Oddly enough, despite their protests that nothing is wrong, Firefox 3 is supposed to have a "built-in memory usage monitor and manager"...

[yendi]

Alas, that seems to be par for the course in the open source community in general.

Oddly enough, despite their protests that nothing is wrong, Firefox 3 is supposed to have a "built-in memory usage monitor and manager"...

Also, they've always been at war with Eastasia.

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

a "built-in memory usage monitor and manager"

Known to programmers everywhere as "the built-in garbage-collection feature of most modern languages"?

[rowancat.livejournal.com]

How many tabs do you keep open?
Mine reads 65Meg Mem Usage.
(doesn't say real or virtual)

[rowancat.livejournal.com]

Oh, and i'm using Version 1.5.00.12.
I refuse to upgrade till they work the bugs out.
Memory leakage has always been a big issue with Firefox...
That said, i rarely use more than 2 or 3 tabs.

Startups-it seems like every piece of software now wants
*instant* access on bootup to te net to look for updates.

Occasionally causes a reboot when the system gets confused and overloaded.
(using one size fits all verizon dsl usb drivers that suppress the normal
windows plug and play for usb doesn't really help- all of those reboots
are stop errors caused by device driver, about one per week.
Used to be 1-2/day till i did some tweaking and downloading updates.
Still looking for updated ethernet drivers... mumble.

[lovingboth]

OK, it's a Windows version 2.0.0.9, but I have about 500 tabs open (yeah, yeah) and it's only using 1.1G of virtual memory. No Flash, but GMail. AdBlock plus is getting rid of animated (and other) ads.