Comment by earl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by earl | Hacker News Reader

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The other thing is that Chrome updates work. They've only broken something once in I think 3 years of daily use at this point (some update unchecked "warn before quitting"). They also don't generally create popups and the update process itself is literally invisible.

Firefox on the other hand... sigh. I really liked that browser, but the updates, and the broken plugins, and the shit memory management, and the developers' heads up their shitty asses denying their shit memory management, and did I mention the enormous memory usage on OSX? Chrome essentially has the same uptime as my laptop, ie months. Firefox required daily restarts with the same browsing patterns. Plus they regularly corrupt the backing file that holds the sites you had open in your browser, so before restarting the browser to get ram back, it's a best practice to copy the location of each and every open tab to a text file.

We got my gf's laptop 8 gigs of ram to accomodate ff and I'm working on talking her into chrome. A browser written by people who know how to use free(3). Plus the updates don't hork random stuff. Plus on the rare occasions I've restarted the browser it has never broken the backing store holding the open tabs.

Actually, Firefox developers care a good deal about memory management. More than Add-on authors unfortunately.

We've had a project called MemShrink running for about a year and it has been making steady progress. and that progress has been shipping to users.

The current Aurora channel release even has a fix for most add-on bad behavior.

Firefox actually stacks up really well in memory usage (even in third party tests).

(I work for Mozilla but was not involved in MemShrink. Also, I wrote this on my phone, so I hope there are no embarrassing misspellings. )

I quit firefox purely over its tendency to leak my entire RAM and force restarts. I was told at the time, and do believe, that the memory leaking was an addon problem. However... firefox was sold on the idea of addons. When your two main messages are "we're the most convenient browser; just look at all our awesome addons!" and "you can't use the addons, or your computer will implode", you've got a serious problem.

I quit using Firefox due to absolutely horrific memory management and I never used a single add-on ever. It was extremely frustrating because every time I went to a forum seeking help the first and only thing people would do is blame add-ons.

It was so bad that I had to close firefox when I wanted to do anything else. If I played a full screen game it would work great for about half an hour the suddenly it'd chug along at 10fps. Without fail the issue was Firefox deciding to consume 90% CPU. And again this is without installing a single add-on ever.

It may be better today. I don't know. I don't care. I switched to Chrome and haven't looked back since.

This is exactly right. The party line was "it's the addons" forever, anytime you brought up Firefox taking up 900MB of RAM after being open for 3 days. Even with no addons. I was so glad to switch to Chrome when it came out because of that.

And then years later they have the "MemShrink project". Which basically was admitting that they were spouting bullshit about it being addons for years.

Haters-be hate'n. And how exactly does the one process per tab of chrome address memory issues? Chrome is complete garbage for me after 30ish tabs. Talk about unresponsive...

The great thing about this model is that closing the tabs kills the processes and therefore frees up memory. Last time I used FFx extensively (6 months-1year ago) I could not say the same thing, even after they announced having a pretty major fix for leaks.

In Chrome you can kill and/or restart tabs without losing your entire session.

State recovery is quite good for the most part, even if memory use is somewhat pants.

Chrome user in Ubuntu, 30ish tabs don't make unresponsive my browser here.

I quit Firefox as soon as Chromium for Linux was available. My problem with Firefox wasn't so much the memory leaks (though those were annoying), but rather that it was SLOW. Opening new tabs caused the whole UI to grind to a halt while they rendered....and this wasn't on a slow computer. I've heard that FF has finally been multithreaded, but I haven't really tested it.

This isn't to say Chrome doesn't have its own memory or performance problems. GMail for example will eat up to 1GB of memory eventually before I notice I'm low. I have to actually close the tab (reloading doesn't fix it) and re-open it. It's "only" using 500MB right now...

Please try FF15 when it comes out on August 28. It has a fix that prevents 90%+ of leaks from add-ons. See http://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/05/07/update-on-lea... for some details (and note that all the follow-on problems mentioned in that post have now been fixed).

The problem is not add-ons. Let me repeat that -- THE PROBLEM IS NOT ADD-ONS. I left Firefox about a year ago, once Chrome was good enough, because my plain-vanilla Firefox, with all the tweaks to limit memory usage enabled, would still leak memory until it crashed (my laptop has 1.5GB RAM and Ubuntu; it also had a few GB of swap). Closing tabs did not help either. The only response from Mozilla was 'add-ons.' Chrome does just fine with 30+ tabs open on the same machine.

Any organization that can live in denial for years and years about the core issue with their product is going to die. Mozilla is tightly connected to the web developer community, but has a complete disconnect from the problems facing its actual users. When Firefox shipped, it was a great, light-weight alternative to Mozilla. From my point of view as a user, I haven't seen any substantial improvements since 1.0 shipped in 2004 -- spell check is nice, and given how often it crashes, restoring tabs when the browser is opened is nice -- but that's all. Otherwise, if not for security issues and web site compatibility issues, I'd be on Firefox 1.0 (which worked fine on sub-GHz machines).

Aside from that, virtually all development effort has been aimed at making a better IDE for web developers. I guess that benefits me since, ultimately, I can visit nicer web sites in Chrome.

There are a lot of users here complaining about Firefox memory usage who don't use it anymore.

Which is expected, because why would you stay if you were really bothered?

Comments from an active user, though... I've stuck with Firefox out of habit probably more than anything else, but now most of the things people (including me) were complaining about are already gone -- as of the last update, Firefox with -- sheesh, I guess I have about 100 tabs in 2 windows -- takes up under 500MB after using it all day, and in the morning it starts in a few seconds (they don't force-reload all your open tabs on startup anymore, just the active ones and I think text from the others is cached locally).

Chrome becomes unusable if I try to use it like a to-do list like this, for UI as well as memory reasons; not that I could say easily how much memory Chrome is using at the moment, with 20 tabs; the separate processes defeats seeing that easily, alas (there must a simple way to check, but I haven't tried).

It's quite stable, and even when it was still crashier (last year?) it's been years since I've actually lost my tabs after a crash; they've always been auto-recovered (and it has that nice prompt to let me close the ones I think may be causing trouble before relaunching).

Given different usage patterns, etc., I have no idea if people trying the actual, current FF will want to go back -- but for anyone who left more than a few months ago (especially if you left due to memory footprint) I'd suggest trying it again sometime.

[And I like the more frequent releases, personally -- I always hated the slow release cycle, and feel like they're starting to get into the swing of it now -- but I obviously don't speak for the crowd on this one...]

A year ago at what release?

Don't know. I grab from official web site, so latest as of a year ago.

AFAIK Mozilla MemShrink was started around that time: http://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2011/06/22/memshrink-pro...

So they actually had a great fix recently where they managed to largely stop addons from causing memory leaks: http://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memshrink/

I don't see how that's a serious problem. An add-on ecosystem can be explained literally as "we let third parties who aren't as skilled as browser-developers develop (optional) parts of our browser." That has both obvious advantages (there are way more developers passing that lower bar, serving many more needs) and obvious drawbacks (a lot of them... can't code very well.)

I had to stop using it at work.. I'd have to restart every 2-3 hours or performance became unbearably slow. The only other "solution" was to remove all my addons, and without the addons there was really no reason to continue using firefox (Firebug was supposedly the main issue, but without firebug I can't do any work)

I never got used to Chrome's Developer Tools. Firebug and a properly working Scrollbar Anywhere / Grab-n-drag (lets you right click anywhere and drag up and down to scroll anywhere in the page) are the only extensions keeping me on Firefox.

The equivalents on Chrome are simply not good enough. I don't know if this is an issue with all Chrome extensions, but Wet Banana / Scrollbar Anywhere on it seem to be running in a low priority and thus have sub-par performance. Scrolling is choppy and doesn't always even initiate, depending on where on the page I right-clicked.

Progress is nice, but unfortunately as a user I don't care too much about progress if the bottom line is the same. Sorry to sound disdainful about your efforts, and I know how hard it is, and I have greatest respect for the efforts of Firefox developers, but the bottom line is - it is (was, last time I checked) still leaking like Eratosthenes' sieve, and still becomes unusable after mere days of work. And even admiration for the product and all the history of it can only hold the user for so long when viable alternative is out there.

To counter your anecdote with another, different anecdote with more numbers in it, back in the days of Firefox 4 and subsequent versions, it would not be unusual for my Firefox to hit 500MB to 1GB of RAM usage after a day of browsing. Right now, my Firefox 15 has been running for a day, and about:memory says the total is 363.26MB. Firefox has slimmed down a lot in the past year.

Well, maybe I'll give it a try soon again. I did about a year ago and was re-disappointed.

The first big post-FF4 improvements were in FF7, which was released in September last year. See http://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2011/08/09/firefox-7-is-... for some details.

And things have improved quite a bit more since FF7.

I personally noticed this too.

> still leaking like Eratosthenes' sieve

It leaks a lot when it's using a tiny amount of memory, and it leaks hardly at all when it's using a large amount of memory?

No, it leaks endlessly without any theoretical bounds and there's no amount of memory that it's leaking won't exceed given enough time.

So you're saying that it's more like a normal sieve than Eratosthenes' sieve?

Apparently it only leaks into address locations that are prime, and setting all others to null.

Sorry, but not that I've seen in any version of Firefox I'm using. Presently ~15 at work (Ubuntu 11.10) and Iceweasel 10 at home. On an 8 GB system, I'm constantly reviewing my browser memory usage and killing/restarting browser sessions on account of memory usage. iceweasel VIRT presently 2163MB.

Sorry, but that's totally nuts.

Mozilla have been claiming "we've solved the memory leak problem" about as long as Microsoft have been claiming "we've solved the virus/security problem", or so it seems. With about the same level of credibility.

I wonder if there are large differences based on usage patterns.

I just finished entering a comment above suggesting people should give it another try; I have 100 or so tabs open and 500MB footprint after using it all day, with version 13 (I just stick with the release update channel) in win7.

In my experience they've very clearly fixed whatever the main memory issue was that affected my experience -- but not yours. Though -- the windows versions may get a bit more testing....

How are you measuring usage? On what platform?

I'm running Firefox 15 / Iceweasel 10 on Ubuntu and Debian respectively, watching VIRT (total virtual memory size). Currently sitting at 2.3 GB, FML.

Hmm, I'm no expert. But AFAIK open memory mapped files are counted towards a process's virtual memory (as displayed by utils like 'top' and 'ps). Dunno if FF uses memory mapped files extensively.

There's a utility called 'pmap' that you can use to display the memory mapped files and subtract it from the total etc.

Finding out how much memory a program is using is surprisingly tricky to compute. Good luck.

I would like to believe you, but since every Firefox release is faster than ever and uses less memory, if that were really true Firefox would run on an Atari and be so fast it would literally travel into the future to fetch pages. But that's not the case.

Your assertion is entirely false. Just because something keeps getting larger/faster/smaller doesn't mean it will eventually be arbitrarily large/fast/small. e.g. the sequence 1, 1 + 1/2, 1 + 1/2 + 1/4, 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8,... keeps getting bigger and bigger, but it never goes past 2.

(Futhermore, in my personal experience, Firefox has been using less and less memory.)

Your sequence is growing, albeit at a decreasing rate, so I'm not sure it's a good fit for memory usage. Unless you meant to say the rate at which Firefox is bloating is slowing. I could believe that. But Firefox is claiming memory usage is following a sequence more like 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, ... Which should approach zero.

If you meant your sequence to represent performance, maybe that's what's happening, but then I think they should stop saying "now 1/1024 faster than before" as if it's a reason to upgrade.

That sequence was merely an example of something that is monotonic and bounded, it wasn't chosen to be a model for memory usage or performance or anything like that.

Also, I don't see Mozilla claiming memory usage follows a curve like 1/x. In fact, I don't seem them claiming anything about long term memory usage other than "it's decreasing", which is true, and can be true without implying that the memory usage will eventually be 0.

(Btw, I don't think Mozilla have ever said something as frivolous as "1/1024 faster".)

What I meant by 1/1024 is either the changes are noticeable or not. If they aren't, don't talk about them.

Sadly though now users have had years of poor memory management burned into their memories. Regardless of if it was FF or the addons, it's associated with FF now and will take time to shed.

Okay, this might sound funny, but Firefox is actually faster than Chrome on my crappy netbook which has about a gig of RAM. Plus, it can handle more tabs (200+, don't ask) without bringing the thing to a screeching halt.

I'm pretty sure you're talking about an earlier version of Firefox -- I agree, there were problems there, but things have gotten much better with the latest versions. I run Firefox Aurora (which is kinda equivalent to Chrome's dev channel) and I haven't seen anything breaking yet.

I've also used Chrome [dev] for a while and while it was pretty good, it also decided to declare that "my user profile was corrupt" after every few days. Not fun. Plus, it could hardly handle 50+ tabs, but I guess that is due to the way the Chromium sandbox and tab threading model works (and the Atom processor in my netbook.)

tl;dr: I run Firefox Aurora (with 200+ tabs) on a netbook with 1 gig of RAM. Where's that memory problem you were talking about?

That matches my experience. Chrome can (according to its internal task manager) easily use over 100MB per tab which adds up quickly. Firefox is much more frugal. And for me Chrome's memory leaks are worse then Firefox's ever were.

Memory management was terrible for ages and ages before the updates. I don't think the updates ever broke memory management.

if you don't use addons, the memory management in Firefox is pretty good - actually measure it competitively against Chrome sometime

I find it is much better than Chrome.

If I have more than a handful of tabs open in Chrome then Chrome starts using significantly more than a GB of RAM (in total, across all the separate Chrome processes), while I've currently got a Firefox session that has been open for more than a week, with 30+ tabs, and is using just under 1 GB.

How are you adding together the Chrome processes? Often when you look at the memory usage of a process, it'll incude all the shared libraries it's using. So if you add together multiple processes, you'll multiply the memory used by that shared library by the number of processes you're adding, even though that memory is, well, shared.

Oh. Hadn't realised that, thanks for the info. :) (I am doing it naively, just from the output of ps, so your point applies. Is there an Chrome equivalent for Firefox's about:memory?)

Even so, with many tabs open, my computer hits swap far more under Chrome than Firefox.

Edit: Ah, yep, answered my own question: about:memory works in Chrome too. Using that, I've got Chrome at 360 MB with 5 tabs and 2 extensions, while Firefox is at 900 with 30+ loaded tabs and ~20 extensions.

huh? Under heavy usage FireFox is better at memory management than Chrome. The memory problems were, what, three years ago or more?

That may be, but you can get rid of the memory that chrome uses. Just close the tab, which releases that memory - since one tab is run as a separate process which then exits and releases all memory.

With Firefox, you have to restart Firefox. All tabs run in the same process, and memory is generally not released back to the OS when someone just calls free() or delete.

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