Hey, I love Firefox like everyone else. Glancing at my logs for DJI, it looks like the majority of you do to (60% of you, in fact; 35% IE, and 5% Safari, if you’re interested). For me, the best part about Firefox is the fantastic plugin / theme support. Where would any of us be without firebug or webdeveloper or greasemonkey, right?
Having said that, I am SO glad that its shadier aspects are getting a little bit of a spotlight at Wired.
I mean, am I the only one who is tired of Firefox’s bloated size and gi-normous RAM footprint? Yes, yes — I know, I should limit the number of tabs I have open, and limit the number of plugins I’m using. Fine. But, you know what? I kind of do, and if I leave Firefox open for more than a day, I too find that my PC grinds to a halt.
The frustrating thing is that although this “problem” with Firefox isn’t new, it never seems to have been directly addressed by Firefox. There are work arounds to the problem thanks to fiddling with the about:config, or even some separate plugins, but are these really optimal solutions?
I mean, while you couldn’t copy Firefox’s community, nor its gargantuan library of extensions, themes and plugins, I do wonder if this represents an opportunity for another browser to surface — one that is slim, fast, and is absolutely thrifty as it comes down to memory usage? One that adheres to all W3C standards?
Could it be done?
Does it already exist, but hasn’t yet gotten enough traction from the Geek community?
If so, let me know.
For the moment, I find myself using Firefox Portable, which is about 30MB, and seems a little faster than the “normal” version. The “portable” aspect of it represents a rebuild so that it can be used off a portable storyage device, like a USB key. Its not ideal for me, since it can’t “remember” anything (cached or otherwise — it doesn’t record a “history” for example), but it is faster, which is a trade off I’ll happily make.
April 25th, 2007 at 4:03 pm | Permalink
I don’t know too much about it…but aren’t you basically describing Opera.
I think what you see with firefox is due to the beta/microsoftication that has taken root in the software industry.
People are willing to deal with a bluescreen of death or a melt down every once in a while, its become the norm. It has just become a fact of life in modern software design.
April 25th, 2007 at 6:54 pm | Permalink
For me the browser you’re looking for is Opera. Yes, it also uses not small amount of RAM, yes it it’s slow for like a minute or two after a night, yes a lot of websites optimized for Firefox features and bugs, but for me it’s the best of what I can get today on Mac/PC.
April 25th, 2007 at 9:10 pm | Permalink
Yeah, I’ve tried Opera — used it for about a year until I found out about Firefox. I may think about going back to be honest.
Cheers
t @ dji
April 25th, 2007 at 9:44 pm | Permalink
I agree, Tony — I’m a huge Firefox fan, and I know I use too many tabs and plugins, but the memory leaks are a giant pain in the ass. The only solution seems to be to buy more RAM.
April 25th, 2007 at 9:45 pm | Permalink
I don’t agree on the Opera solution, FF rules because of the strength of its plugins/ add ons, where as Opera just doesn’t have the same level of community support to take it to the same level. Bit I hear you Tony on the memory issues, they seem to get worse with every update instead of better, and the silly thing is that FF 1.x never had the same issues, at least not noticeably anyway.
April 25th, 2007 at 9:58 pm | Permalink
I hear you Duncan — I know I wouldn’t make do without WebDeveloper and all the other goodies. But its a hefty price to pay.
I wonder if someone could make a smaller, faster, version of Firefox, that was *also* compatible with all themes / extensions / plugins of Firefox … ?
Hmmm …. hmmm … ;)
[incidentally, Duncan, this isn’t the first time we’ve chatted about this — seems like Firefox never seems to want to address the memory issue, eh? ]
April 25th, 2007 at 10:01 pm | Permalink
Matt,
The problem is that I’ve actually *bought* more RAM, and it doesn’t really solve the problem. Firefox’s memory-eating-abilities have the properties of a “gas” … it expands to fill (or use up) whatever container it happens to be sitting in! :)
No, seriously — I added another 0.5 gigs to double my previous capacity, and it didn’t do a helluva lot.
April 25th, 2007 at 11:01 pm | Permalink
Just on the memory comments, I upgraded from 512mb to 2 gig, still have the same problem now with FF, it just consumes more and more memory as it becomes available, although at least now it doesn’t affect multi-tasking as it once did (try loading Photoshop with 30 tabs open in FF with 512mb and you’ll see what I mean).
Tony, you’re right, we’ve been here before, and if it was any other product, I would have flicked it long ago, but theres just too many add ons I rely on now, everything from SEOpen, Developers Toolbar, Gmarks plugin…indeed, maybe I do need to prune them a little, over a dozen installed :-) What I don’t get is why do the FF developers continue to ignore the memory problem?
April 25th, 2007 at 11:58 pm | Permalink
That’s an excellent question, Duncan — and my money is on that when FF 3.0 rolls around, it will be a question we’ll *still* be asking ourselves.
(Tony: FF is still a memory hog!
Duncan: I know! Wait, we’ve been here before — twice!)
April 26th, 2007 at 12:59 pm | Permalink
[…] at Deep Jive Interests Tony asks why the Firefox people haven’t addressed the issue of memory hogging yet. I’ve been wondering this myself. There have been a number of optimization articles written […]
April 27th, 2007 at 11:57 am | Permalink
I simply can’t do without some of the extensions. In fact I am in love with FLOCK but its way more bloated than FF. I tried Opera for a while and loved it but couldn’t do without my FF extensions :(. So I am still stuck with FF
April 27th, 2007 at 12:04 pm | Permalink
The (main) reason why both, FF and Opera, memory hogs are is the restore session feature.
The principle is simple : every that many time, both take a snapshot of your session and this is saved in your RAM. With time it bloats.
Would it be simple to make the snapshot overwrite the former session? Maybe but you’d need at least two snapshots anyway (what if FF crashes while writing a new snapshot?).
Another problem, and the reason why sometimes closing alone isn’t enough, is not only FF’s problem. Hardly any program really gives free the used RAM after it is closed. Of course the memory is available, but all the data all still there. If a program had to erase ( = overwrite) every time the used memory while closing down, everyone wouyld be whining about the closing down time.
Don’t believe that the Session Manager our main guilty one is? SM saves the full tab history and everything…
Just try to keep on an unused computer FF open for some hours without really visiting any sites. Keep 15 tabs ope, even keep a not too much used Gmail account open, you can even use Gmail Manager for several accounts and have your Twitter tab open. Check after 6-7 hours how little memory FF has reserved. I guess around 80MB compared to the 230-240+ MB (or more) we are used to.
April 27th, 2007 at 2:32 pm | Permalink
I’ve ditched firefox in favor of Safari on my mac. I agree with you–it’s just too much of a memory and CPU resource hog! On the PC, though I still use FF.
I’m adjusting, but I think it’s worth it, considering the performance gains (and the added productivity, because with FF I tended to have tons of tabs open).
April 27th, 2007 at 4:22 pm | Permalink
At work I live on Portable Firefox. My work PC doesn’t allow me to install software and we haven’t made the jump to IE7. A life without tabbed browsing is rough.
Gmail/Bloglines open brings Firefox to about 80mb of memory
May 9th, 2007 at 11:35 pm | Permalink
I agreed. Really can’t live with tab function in browser nowadays. I am being using Firefox since years. Although I do use IE7 something to check my website layout is ok or not. But most of the time, I use FF to browse. FF rocks!!!
May 19th, 2007 at 7:00 pm | Permalink
[…] Tony, this one is especially for you. […]
September 16th, 2007 at 12:47 am | Permalink
[…] Ugh. […]