Comment by zb3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zb3 | Hacker News Reader

Stop suggesting this Firefox crap which is not only much slower but it also can't even properly manage RAM usage on mobile, leading to app being killed on my low-RAM device, chrome can deal with it even though that's a "desktop" version with extensions for a much newer high end device.

Restricting webRequestBlocking (but it's not going away, just needs a policy extension) and synchronous executeScript did in practice make adblockers unreliable though.. I partially worked it around by using a custom extension that uses the recent userScripts API..

BTW, it's not possible to inject scripts to workers like a ServiceWorker or to replace it's content (DNR let's you redirect but this redirect breaks SW origin + it's visible when you disallow redirects), but MV2 was no better, chrome extensions never had advanced capabilities for ad blocking, a bug about not being able to access POST data via webRequest was open for 10+ years and will probably never be fixed.

But still, firefox is not the alternative, even WebKit is much better.

You obviously don't know how Android works. When an app hasn't been open for a while and it has no background tasks, it gets put to sleep. Waking it up takes a second.

You can delay that by selecting the app in the settings and choosing its Battery setting to Unrestricted, however, despite its name, it will still get suspended

The checks are poorly coded. Even on Unrestricted, if you play music from a web player, the browser will get suspended after the song ends but before a new one starts playing because there's a point where it awaits data on the foreground task, Android sees it has no background tasks and suspends it.

Man, I backported freezer v2 cgroup implementation into 4.4 kernel so these cached tasks are suspended, don't tell me how Android works please :)

What are you running, Android 9.0?

LineageOS 22.2 which is Android 15, but yes, the device originally came with Android 9.

How little RAM does your phone have? My Moto G4 Power (less than $200, before the RAM crunch much less) with 2 GB runs Firefox hunky-dory, and I'm one of those triple-digit tab people.

It's not about the number of (possibly sleeping) tabs, it's about how FF doesn't manage those active ones to prevent the app from crashing.. try opening 10 instagram profiles (via open in new tab) in the web browser.

I told you all that Chrome doesn't crash, FF does + pages work much slower.

Have you verified what caused the crash via logcat? Firefox has never crashed in my case, not even once (but I'm not running a low ram device).

That was nearly a year ago because chrome with extensions then arrived, but I did verify it was caused by RAM (usage was growing as FF was loading these tabs in background), then I did set some tweak in about:config which made the issue a little less severe (open in new tab didn't start loading them), but it still crashed if I then manually switched tabs, FF did not unload previous ones despite running out of RAM.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com