Firefox 5 Details: Social Sharing, Extension Integration | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 5 Details: Social Sharing, Extension Integration

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30 pointspeternorton40 comments

I hate to keep beating what appears to be a dead horse, but in my experience, it's still alive.

Firefox _still_ has performance issues, even with version 4. Not even 5 minutes ago, I had it start using up 100% CPU on 2 cores and had to killall it. No Flash, <5 extensions.

So hopefully Mozilla won't forget about performance in their rush to add all these "social" features. I don't know about other people, but I probably won't use them at all.

This is exactly why I switched to Chrome.

Not a dead horse at all. I haven't used firefox as my primary browser for almost 2 years now because of this very issue. I don't care how many cool features a piece of software or hardware has if it doesn't do the most basic functions well. Sadly there are very few companies and organizations that focus on the core performance of their product.

Performance was the main selling point of Firefox 4, so I'm at a bit of a loss as to how you can claim that Mozilla doesn't focus on performance.

There is a big difference between saying you focus on something and actually achieving it. I'm not trying to slam the Firefox team, but they have a lot of strong competition in the performance department these days.

Yup, we do (I work for Mozilla). We're glad that have this strong competition, it makes for a better market and better products for the users to choose from.

Note that Firefox nightlies are already ~10% faster than Firefox 4. Performance continues to be an important part of our development efforts.

What does 10% faster mean? When people talk about "performance" I'm sure that most of them actually mean UI responsiveness, not raw number crunching performance. How do you measure that and what does 10% in that context mean?

It's actually around 10% faster at a bunch of things. :) This includes some DOM APIs and just raw JS perf, depending on your platform.

Responsiveness will be improved in a different manner. We are working on a bunch of improvements for later in 2011 that should make a big difference. I think Firefox 4 is in general much better than 3.6, and I expect to see parallelism, responsiveness, and reliability continue to improve.

The big ticket items are multiprocess browsing and better debugging APIs--we have an issue with developer extensions causing performance problems. This is not necessarily the fault of Firebug or any of the other extensions. We need a better foundation for them to build on, and it really hurts us to give developers a slow experience.

Because it was "the main selling point", I had high hopes. But after using FF4 for a couple months, it hasn't fixed the annoying lags that creep into simple operations (even scrolling!) once you have a lot of tabs open, and require a browser restart for (temporary) relief.

As always, if you have steps to reproduce we would love to hear them. Startup time is still the #1 performance metric we optimize for.

Performance? Don't make me laugh. Want an easy example, here's my old blog (don't mind the ugliness I changed it long ago) it takes over 10secs for me to load on Firefox. Chrome loads it in 0.2secs. That's what, 5000% faster for Chrome? No CSS at all, just pure JavaScript. Click on the "Display Next 30 entries" at the bottom of the page and notice how it takes 5-6 secs every time, while Chrome does it instantly.

http://dendory.net/blog.old.html

Come on… though I don't use Firefox that much other than testing compatibility ever since Chrome was stable enough for daily use, but FF4 is significantly faster than 3. Your page loads in <1sec in both Chrome and FF4 on my machine.

Same for me, <1 sec for the page, as well as the more entries button.

Dude, you're using synchronous XHR. You're blocking the entire UI on the network request (which happened to be slow when you tested it in Firefox, which is why you blamed Firefox). Switch to async mode!

"Startup time is still the #1 performance metric we optimize for."

Isn't it a bit wrong direction now that people keep the browser open all day long (compared to years ago that they close and open it frequently)?

Don't get me wrong, though. I would like to have Firefox startup fast. I just think maybe the focus at this stage of browser development should be something like faster tab creation and less memory leaks?

Firefox 4 is pretty amazing, but I just encountered a problem today: on the Mac, it doesn't even try to use the system's language priority, and by default it displays Japanese characters before Chinese (thus inconsistent rendering of characters), even though the system preference is configured to have Chinese over Japanese. Eventually I found there is a Firefox-only language setting in the browser. Maybe this is just design-philosophy, but still it feels not very native system-friendly.

So far, Firefox 4 hasn't yet won my heart. Most of geek friends I know are using Chrome, and giving the current situation, are unlikely to revert to Firefox any time soon. I'm interested to see how the Firefox could regain its older crown.

I don't really care for startup time as once a browser is open it doesn't get closed till a reboot comes around which for many will be the case. I do care for nice things not eating up my cores.

Here's a simple example I botched together. Firefox has the worst performance when it comes to rendering a simple css transforms. Firefox hits > 80% CPU time when the effect is in play compared to < 30% for the competition and < 7% for Safari.

http://pastebin.com/NnNrEbTs

Copy / paste and mouse hover like a mad man.

Firefox and Performance still don't belong in the same sentence for me as it stands.

And my Firefox 4 periodically OOM-crashes on Windows 7. It's also extremely overzealous in its allocation of decompressed graphics buffers (far worse than Firefox 3.5), so it typically uses upwards of 2GB of RAM for a set of tabs that previously only used 1GB.

Sometimes if I have tabs with a lot of large images open, Firefox will start up, allocate up to the 32-bit limit on Windows (~3GB)... then deallocate all the graphics buffers and drop down to 1GB. This process can take upwards of 5 minutes.

They blame the memory leaks on extensions, but if there's no way to see which extensions are using the memory besides a month-long exhaustive search (it typically take days to leak enough memory to crash), how are we to know?

There is work underway to make the new extension system (Jetpack) load extensions out-of-process. This will make it easy to see how much memory each extension is using. Unfortunately, add-ons built using the traditional system will still be in-process. Most of them depend on being able to synchronously dive into the page or browser DOM and mess with it, which makes accounting hard.

The 32-bit Windows graphics thing sounds like a bug. Setting max-concurrent-tabs in about:config to 0 may help.

Hey there. Which extensions do you have installed? We have some problems with a few popular ones and Firefox 4.0. We'll be pushing out a 4.0.1 to deal with this issue.

* ABP

* Greasemonkey

* LastPass

* Pentadactyl

Did you try running vanilla FF? As FF team says, some extensions are performance hogs.

I've run vanilla FF, but not for any significant period of time. At this point, browsing without at least ABP, LastPass, and Pentadactyl is damn near impossible for me because I've become so dependent on them.

We have a bunch of bugs filed on ABP leaks when other extensions are installed. The author of that extension is very responsive, and I gather we will see progress soon.

my firefox experience was plagued with performance problems for quite a few releases, including 4.0. a big problem was that every few seconds it would pause for a moment which made scrolling and watching videos unbearable. (googling "firefox freeze" shows a lot of people have this issue.) i tried uninstalling all of my extensions and installing them one-by-one to figure out what caused it, but the problem never got significantly better.

i was about ready to jump ship to another browser until i decided to completely wipe out my firefox profile and start over. after doing this, my performance problems have not come back, even after manually re-installing all of my add-ons, greasemonkey scripts, etc. i don't know what kind of cruft my firefox profile had accumulated over the years (i've even migrated it between operating systems), but starting over fresh solved a lot of problems for me.

I had issues like that after upgrading to 4. I exported my bookmarks and created a clean profile, which seemed to fix the issue.

I was terribly disappointed by the performance of FF4. When releasing blockbattle.net (very JS heavy game), we knew it performed poorly in FF3.6 while flying in Chrome/Safari. We made some changes and optimizations and thought that FF4 would be at least as fast as older versions of chrome/safari but no such luck.

We now have to dedicate extra time to investigating and optimizing performance for FF4, which makes it scarily like IE - you get everything working in Chrome/Safari, then spend extra time getting it to work on other browsers like FF and IE.

Usually comments like yours are the result of relying on precise setTimeout()/setInterval(). Firefox has a very coarse-grained setTimeout/setInterval (it's capped at 10ms) compared to WebKit. Mozilla can't change this easily as it breaks the web and hurts power management.

I just took a cursory glance at blockbattle.net's source and it may well be the problem. Thankfully, FF4 has a solution: mozRequestAnimationFrame(). This explanation [1] should be required reading for everyone doing games and animations in JS.

[1]: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/08/mozreque...

Then: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.

Now: Every program attempts to expand until it can annoy the user's friends.

Welcome to the future. Sadly, we don't have jetpacks or flying cars yet.

I desperately hope that the "social" features are implemented as an add-on (presumably installed by default) that can be removed by those who do not want them.

Much like with other features we've added recently (Sync, Panorama, etc.), these features won't impact you at all if you don't use them.

Holy crap, the loading bar on top of the tabs is genius! File upload indicator will be similarly awesome.

I'm excited to see Identity Management finally being rolled into the browser. Mozilla's been talking for some time about binding your accounts to the browser itself, rather than loose, forgotten usernames and passwords.

Yes, this is really important. I'm hoping that with Firefox moving in this direction the Chromium team will incorporate similar features.

Since there are Mozilla devs here, let me ask a question: Why? Why not have the browser be really solid for strictly HTML/JS processing, provide a stable extension/plugin API, and have everything else be an optional add-on?

Why do I need a PDF viewer built into a browser? Why an RSS feed reader built in? Why bundle in "social" features? Why not leave these to user-selected, user-loadable options?

It mentions playing MP3 files. Is this just going to call out to a 3rd party service or is it do with the fact that MP3 patents (for decode at least) are supposed to be running out soon. Or will Mozilla pay the licence fee and provide a free plugin, similar to Fluendo's plugin for Linux, in anticipation of the patents running out. Will they add support in the audio tag?

when does a browser become a platform? The lines are getting blurry.

Oh sure, NOW add the social sharing. Grrn

Hate to downvote you since I know you are a well-respected member of this community, but I can't figure out what you're getting at with this comment.

Are you suggesting that Mozilla should have acquired Delicious to incorporate social sharing features within the browser? Or am I totally missing something obvious?

Or maybe I spent a lot of time trying to get browser folks to do it to no avail.

(there are now more delicious people at moz, especially weave, than there are at delicious.)

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