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Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that does not need to be restarted after every hour or 2 of browsing lest it become more and more unresponsive.

I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that can start scrolling before all the Javascript on the page has finished running.

(I'm using FF 7 on Snow Leopard with 1 gig of RAM. Would I have to restart FF less often if I had more RAM?)

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I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that does not need to be restarted after every hour or 2 of browsing lest it become more and more unresponsive.

Amen, brother. I have been a Mozilla / Firefox / Seamonkey / etc. fanboy for years, but even I finally gave up and moved to using Chrome primarily, and it was mainly due to that very problem. For years now they've battled memory issues (I say "issues" since they continue to insist that there aren't any "leaks" per-se) that kill performance... one release will work great, then the next release, it's back to more of the same... next release, things get better... another release, and it's time for a RAM upgrade again... it's like they seem to be totally incapable of truly, finally, getting a handle on the memory usage situation. :-(

To me, it's clear that they have spent more time making a rendering engine that is more compatible with CSS and Javascript. Every other popular browser(including Opera) has some serious Javascript and CSS rendering issues where it counts. From my development experience Firefox is the most developer friendly browser, by miles.

Firefox has made memory overhead a serious priority in the Fx7 & Fx8 development cycles, with some impressive results:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058#c31

FF 7.0a2 (got Jul 24 from the Aurora channel) is less responsive than FF 3.6 was on my machine -- although I cannot be sure that the unresponsiveness is due to memory pressure rather than, e.g., insufficient parallelism of the UI relative to the part that executes Javascript.

I think you can help them in this -- they're starting to gather UI responsiveness metrics. If you're seeing especially bad UI lag, they'd probably like you to run those metrics to help them figure out what is going on.

http://blog.mozilla.com/ted/2011/06/27/measuring-ui-responsi...

Possibly disable hardware acceleration.

Disable: Google Updater Google Toolbar FlashBlock if you have NoScript

Disabling hardware acceleration (it's in the General tab of the Advanced pref pane) seems to have solved the horrible problems I was having with Firefox 7. Thanks!

Too little, too late. It took them literally years to admit that they had a problem. I've long since migrated, and I know many other people that have as well.

Maybe for you.

For me, I try Chrome out very often but keep coming back to Firefox because of the fantastic extensions, and because it just feels right in a way that Chrome doesn't.

But that's OK: I'm assuming you've migrated to Chrome, and that's a very good thing. The competition between Firefox and Chrome has only served to make both browsers better.

Two open source browsers with a significant user base? In 2001, we only could've hoped to be so lucky ;)

Running FF5 on Win7, 2 GB of RAM. I leave it open all day with no issues. 5+ tabs at all times.

You have caused me to resolve to buy more RAM. Thanks.

1 GB is pretty meager for general use these days.

I think you need minimum 2 GB of RAM, ideally 4GB+. More than 4-5 tabs on 1G machine will deteriorate performance very easily.

I find this a bit silly. I could understand, maybe, if I had four tabs open with Flash going in each one, or perhaps a very JS-intensive UI. But if I'm doing mostly "normal" browsing and my browser needs for than a gig of RAM to operate normally, I'd say something is wrong.

Well, as a user you have the option of using another browser. Though, admittedly, with 1 gig of RAM I can't think of any decent one that wont give you problems after a few hours of browsing -- maybe chrome?

As a web developer, I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that lets you change the line-height of a button/input element. Such a simple change, yet the problem has been around since 2006, if I recall correctly.

It's not a simple change, because sites actually rely on not being able to _decrease_ the line-height. I tried allowing sites to change the line-height and had to back that out because of sites breaking. You can read the whole sordid story at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349259

Note that the change to allow changing line-height specifically on <button> did stick, and will ship in the next Firefox release in 3 weeks or so.

Thanks for the reply.

My opinion is that relying on line-height being unable to decrease a height of an element is a really bad idea and the owners of those sites should just be forced to fix it. Of course, I understand how from your perspective making a change that breaks a site like youtube (and probably a decent percentage of sites in general) is probably not an acceptable solution.

Oh well, I personally only needed line-heights on button elements, so the mentioned change will actually solve my UI problems. Thank you.

Yeah, if I could force site owners to fix their sites my job would be way easier. ;)

As it is, if no browser allows it, then sites will depend on not being able to do it, and any browser that does allow it will be perceived as buggy (adding to the resistance to fix the problem on the site's end).

I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that can start scrolling before all the Javascript on the page has finished running.

That's weird, that's what happens to me in Chrome, not Firefox.

Try disabling all add-ons, it got me to really low RAM usage and I had AdBlock & Firebug only earlier.

Will disabling Flashblock improve performance?

(The only other extension I use is Adblock plus.)

Should I disable the plug-ins the come with FF?

Np plugins ship with Firefox.

I am not on snow leopard yet so I dont know how much 1gig of RAM is by Snow Leopard standards but for reference how does Chrome / Safari do in comparison?

I haven't used Chrome enough to say because if you increase the text size on Chrome to where I like it then the text spills over the right side of the window (at least on 13.3-inch Macbooks) with the result that one has to scroll back and forth horizontally for every line of text. I admit that my preference for large text is unusual though.

Safari was unresponsive (spinning beach ball) even more of the time than FF has been.

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