Firefox, Heal Thyself
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
I have this type of issue more with Chrome than Firefox though and it always seems to be related to leaving a tab open with a video for a long time, even if it isn't being played.
And the about:memory page, which shows you memory usage of all your extensions too.
Have you tried out the about:memory page? It doesn't do CPU, but it is a good way to see what particular pages are hogging memory.
It seems to me that you could do this "well enough" if you put each page in its own process and let the OS tell you which are burning the CPU. There could/would be edge-cases where a page causing issues would not appear like it was causing issues, looking at it from that level, but it would sure as hell be a good start.
As for why running the GC might increase RAM usage, I guess it is possible that some memory had been paged out, but running the GC causes the browser to touch all memory, paging it back in. That's just a guess though.
My browser crashes on average twice a day due to running out of memory and FF just giving up. It doesn't even crash gracefully, it just up and quits.
(I frequently have ~100 tabs open, and I am quite thankful that Firefox lets me search across my tabs! Very useful feature)
Once I get to 10 or 15 tabs I usually end up closing all but one or two just to stay focused.
Well the hacker news homepage for instance.
I typically go down and middle click on any story I find interesting, and the comments section to go with it.
This can easily end up with 8-14 tabs open.
Now repeat the same thing for my Reddit frontpage (or just /r/programming!) and I can easily hit another 30 tabs within a couple of minutes.
Every URL someone posts in the comments that seems interesting also gets opened in a new tab. An active discussion easily results in another 5-10 tabs (and remember, that is per discussion thread!).
If one of those tabs goes to Wikipedia, then I'll middle click any links in the Wikipedia article that sound relevant. This can add another 10 tabs easily.
Within 10 minutes of turning on my computer I am now easily up to 50+ tabs.
I am a very fast reader. :)
> Have you ever tried limiting yourself to one window and the judicious use of the back button?
Well yes, but then Tabs were invented!
My browsing is like a tree, pages branch off every which way. I used to have to keep track of that entire tree structure in my head, now the browser does it for me!
And how does it do that? Have you got some pictorial representation of the paths? Do you use a plugin? When you have opened a link in a new tab, how do you then find out where that tab originated from, or rather where you spawned it from? How do you organize them? A tab is just a cheap window isn't it?
IE actually attempts to kinda sorta organize tabs properly. FF is odd because if you left click a tab and have Open In New Tab set, the tab is opened at the end of your tab bar. If you middle click, it is opened adjacent to your current tab.
I forget which browser attempted auto tab groups by color. Never worked out that well for me.
When I say the browser keeps the tree structure for me, I meant that I no longer have to remember how many pages back I need to go to click the next relevant link. If I am 10 pages deep into Wikipedia, remembering which originating article has another link on it I want to explore is difficult. If I just open each link I want to read in a new tab (instead of immediately following it) I can finish the current page I am on.
Back in the day of dial up, I'd use Opera and disable images - to make page loads quicker. I would connect the modem, go online, open as many links as possible in different tabs, and then disconnect. And read at my leisure.
It would force me to think upfront at what I wanted to look at, and in the main it was a pretty good system.
Pages back then would take a long time to load, especially with images - so background loading your next link, was a habit that you just got into.
I forget which browser has which behaviour with new tabs. Some place the tab on the end. Which makes sense in terms of using a stack. Your last link being opened being on the end. Firefox as it does tab scrolling, makes it hard to see what you have open. So I think now the default is to open the new tab next to the current tab. Which highlights another inconsistency in between application tab behaviour.
I used to have loads of tabs open of stuff, that I'd get around to reading at some point - but I'd basically never read, or it would become overwhelming - and I'd just periodically shut all the tabs and start again. Later I thought I'd bookmark anything that grabbed my attention, and go back to it later. Recent bookmarks can help there.
I don't see much difference between a bookmark and a tab, a tab though just feels a little more accessible but it's more expensive. Better bookmarking tools could make tabs easily redundant.
The 'group your tabs' feature of Firefox, just doesn't work for me, and other tab plugins haven't worked for me either. Opera has tab stacks, but I can't say I'm that fond of them either. I'd rather something a little more automated.
Anyway - way off the original topic...
I do most of my project research and documentation lookup in the browser, which means I might have anywhere from 10-30 tabs of pertinent information corresponding to each project on each virtual desktop, across multiple browser windows.
This is just convenient for me; I never have to swap in application/desktop state, because all my information, files, IDEs, etc are right there, exactly the way that I left them.
That comes out to 210 tabs at the absolute maximum; right now I seem to have around 100 Chrome tab process running. Fortunately, RAM is cheap these days.
Do you have any Firefox add-ons installed? If you have the patience to identify a misbehaving add-on (by bisecting the add-ons you are running), Mozilla might be able to address the problem in the browser or reach out to the add-on developer.
My only add-ons are AB+, Reddit Enhancement Suite, and No Redirect. I am 99% sure this was happening before Noredirect, but I'll try disabling that as well. (Super useful though, wow!)
(GreaseMonkey is also installed, but I don't have any scripts loaded in it, disabling it anyway)
Of course if you run into the 32bit memory limit, I don't know if there is much FF can do about it! Right now I am at ~1,5800MB.
Actually this is sort of amusing, the memory usage counts up to 1590, then drops down to 1570, then counts up to 1591, drops to 1571, counts to 1592, drops to 1572, I am watching some stupid web app leak memory in real time.
(Maxed out at 1588 when I started typing, now maxing out at 1606, heh)
All of this is as reported in Windows Task Manager so numbers are wildly inaccurate I assume, still funny. (About:memory is showing the same thing happening!)
Ah the wonders of crappy JS programmers.
Edit: Haven't changed any websites or loaded any new tabs, now it is cycling up to 1630MB. :P
With a 64bit memory address space, who cares?
OK so my page file does.
I think I've only given it 100GB or so to play around with, so, sure, if the 32GB of system ram I have available fills up, and all 100GB of my page file get used up, then I'll have to restart FF.
At ~5GB a day of usage, and lets round down for the sake of losses, that is about 20 days of up time before Firefox is denied malloc's by my OS.
Still not great, but a lot better than crashing twice a day!
It MUST be an add-on !
All of my add-ons except for Ad Block Plus are disabled right now, 2.1GB of memory is being used.
I'm sure I could open up 200 tabs of Hacker News without problem. ;)
Just freezes after start up, even in safe mode (well, when it even booted up, which it stopped doing after a couple tries).
Stuff like this is why Chrome is my primary browser.
Both browsers have issues.
My text editor and my email client don't need dedicated health-reporting subsystems.
That is the core of the problem right there. The need for a new health-reporting system is just a symptom or a consequence.
ADDED. An argument can be made that my operating system is already a system so complicated or unreliable that it requires its own specialized health-monitoring subsystem (of which Unix commands ps, free and top and OS X's Activity Monitor are a part). My response is that I resent having to deal with two such systems instead of only one.
Although there are text-only web browsers. But there's a reason I don't use them.
An aside... If W3m was as fast as Firefox - I'd most likely use it. Bizarre really as you wouldn't expect it to be slower.
Although I freely concede that making it into an application-delivery platform had large benefits, it also had the adverse effect of making its use for its original purpose more confusing, more frustrating, more tedious, less secure and less reliable, which is a thing to be regretted because there is much utility and promise in its original purpose of giving people a convenient and inexpensive way to publish and consume text, images and links on the internet.
I wish the people who wanted a platform on which to deliver applications over the internet -- a platform neither owned or controlled by any single corporation, which I freely admit was a worthy goal -- had found some other way to get their wish without making so many headaches for the people whose goal is to use the internet to publish or consume text, images and links.
Although it is nice that this second set of people have the opportunity to learn this new health-monitoring subsystem of Firefox, it would have been even better if the software for viewing text and images and for following links were uncomplicated and reliable enough to make a new health-monitoring subsystem unnecessary.
So, to answer your question directly, yes, there is an alternative to viewing websites in a complex, general-purpose browser other than downloading "website" apps to run locally. Namely, it is the alternative that existed in 1994 when web pages were not executable programs. Their being "just plain documents" rather than executable programs drastically limited the kinds of things that could go wrong. Another alternative would to persuade the online publishers of 2013 to move to a new system that does not double as an application-delivery platform and consequently does not suffer the reliability and other problems that the web has. (Yes, I know that is very unlikely to happen.)
May I suggest that if you want to continue this conversation, you switch it to email? My address is in my profile.
I wonder what some specifics are for this statement.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711475
I don't know if this is what you're talking about, but I'd don't blame the "IT folk". Seriously, what kind of idiot requires their users to run with administrator accounts for their software to function properly? What is this 2005?
Using the data that is being collected today, we can analyze poor performance and stability and correlate it with certain extensions and plugins, going down to the level of version and platform specifics. We can then provide better blocklisting based on this data, in addition to providing the user with the tool to see the results for themselves and offer suggestions such as updating an add-on or uninstalling it.
My Firefox experience is getting to the point it's virtually unusable, with very, very slow response to any actions (especially new tab / new window functions). We're talking about many seconds, sometimes a minute or more.
While the overall footprint of Firefox is smaller than Chrome, Chrome's sandboxing of tabs gives vastly better user-based memory management: I've got the option of killing off tabs (without closing them) that are using excessive memory, restoring net system responsiveness.
Firefox uses a single process space, and slowness in one tab seems to extend elsewhere (my general observation, not based on analysis).
A larger part of the problem is a combination of how browsers facilitate (or don't) content management and browsing as a task and workflow, and the increasing emphasis on highly-interactive sites.
The lack of such tools, and especially the paucity of bookmarks as a management tool, means that my usual workflow management is:
- Open browser.
- Open lots of tabs. It's not uncommon for me to have 100s of tabs open across multiple browser windows.
For Firefox, Tree Style Tabs at least give some semblance of structure as to how I've traced down some link path. The flat horizontal tabs of Chrome absolutely suck in this regard. Having a better way to navigate the tabspace would help greatly.
What I've recently discovered, and what's radically changing my use of the Web, is Readability (Instapaper and Pocket are similar services). It's amazing. I've written a bit about this at Google+: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/PhQR421e... https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/fVK7aJuB...
Readability solves three problems:
It renders web pages viewable. Far, far, far too many websites have designs which are overtly hostile to actually reading content (even HN, to some degree). Even those which are readable are far too distracting in the present ad-driven eyeball economy.
It manages my reading list. Rather than opening content in tabs, I append it to my reading list. Readability also offers tags (though limited to 500 per user, a wall I hit 2 days in) to help organize content (Firefox offers these for bookmarks, Chrome does not).
And the reading list is available across different browsers and devices (I'm not usually a fan of sharing personal information, least of all my reading interests, through a service, but in this case the convenience factor wins out).
Both of these factors could be addressed, somewhat, in a browser. I've been agitating for a while for a bifurcation of the browser space. Give me:
1. A browser primarily oriented at CONTENT. Simple, minimal page presentation (along the lined of Readability), focusing principally on core page content. With wide margins, high contrast, and a readable font face, and the ability to manage, organize, prioritize, sort, search, and cross-reference content.
2. A browser that is a highly-interactive application engine. Essentially today's Chrome (this fits with Google's long-term interests at replacing desktop apps).
We've mashed both of these under a single roof, and the fit's getting increasingly awkward.
Some things that would greatly help Firefox (and Chrome for that matter):
You do not need to have every tab loaded, rendered, in active memory and sucking CPU at the same time.
Give priority to the foreground tab. Close out background tabs (on a least-used / highest-footprint basis) and restore them when they're navigated to. The tab-switching hit should be bought back by overall greater browser performance.
Completely redesign bookmarks with thought given to workflow. The absolutely WORST UI attribute in any environment I've encountered across platforms is windows which cannot be resized, and bookmark management windows are horrible in this respect. I need MUCH more space to work with.
Improve responsiveness. One of the most painful aspects is how I interact with bookmarks. I can't open my bookmarks list, left-click a folder, and select "add page here" from a menu. Why not? DO NOT REPLICATE CHROME'S PLACEMENT OF "DELETE FOLDER" IMMEDIATELY ABOVE "ADD PAGE AND FAIL TO PROVIDE A DELETION CONFIRMATION DIALOG FFS!!!!!*
The existing "add page modal dialog is fucking annoying as hell* Half the time I want to refer back to the browser page itself to add information but the modal dialog blocks all browser page input.
Provide a duplicate entry search and reconcilliation.
Emphasize tags. They're present but poorly presented.
Emphasize bookmarks for navigation.
Improve annotation capabilities, including cross-referencing.
Provide a decentralized sharing mechanism. I don't care for SAAS generally on privacy basis, think FreedomBox. A low-overhead means to reference a resource from which I can post/recover my bookmarks from multiple devices and browsers would be useful.
Include a few lines of context from the page. Readability's "expanded* article view is excellent in this regard. Page titles almost always pretty much exactly suck. Though if you do this, provide both expanded and collapsed views.
ALLOW THE BOOKMARKS LIST TO WORK AS WORKFLOWS. "Date added", "date modified", and "last viewed" would be great. An "archive" flag is also useful (promote unarchived bookmarks up, allow viewing archived bookmarks if desired).
Provide the ability to download the bookmarks source in offline-readable format. Readability has the capacity to create ePub and Kindle content. Though it doesn't have a bulk-export tool (this would fucking completely absolutely rock my world).
Look at eBook management tools -- Moon+Reader, Calibre, etc. These are designed with libraries of content in mind. As antipatterns, look at Adobe Reader and PDF management in general (there is none) and avoid their worse mistakes, specifically: no management of archives, no bookmarking, no annotations, fixed-form-factor rendering, craptastic search, no tagging, poor zoom, very awkward in-document navigation, no cross-referencing capabilities.
1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558882
2. This is being worked on. Gecko is a very old and complex codebase, and doing that without breaking every existing addon is hard.
> You do not need to have every tab loaded, rendered, in active memory and sucking CPU at the same time. > Give priority to the foreground tab. Close out background tabs (on a least-used / highest-footprint basis) and restore them when they're navigated to. The tab-switching hit should be bought back by overall greater browser performance.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=675539
> windows which cannot be resized, and bookmark management windows are horrible in this respect
Maybe you're talking about Chrome here? I don't know, Firefox's History window is resizeable.
> Improve responsiveness.
See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Snappy and point 2 above.
The points re. tags, bookmarks and annotations can and should be implemented as addons.
> Provide a decentralized sharing mechanism F1/Firefox Share was being worked on a while ago. I don't know what happened to the project.
> "Date added", "date modified", and "last viewed" would be great.
We have all of that, in the History window.
> Provide the ability to download the bookmarks source in offline-readable format.
Seems like a great idea for an addon.
Firefox is not library management software, but it's flexible enough that you can turn it into one.
Re: #675539 I'd make unload happen _far_ faster. Within a few minutes, most likely, subject to some user testing to see what impacts/effects are shown. Rather than time the unload, I'd suggest limiting use to some number of active tabs (plus "pinned" tabs). Once that limit is exceeded, start unloading.
Resizable windows: the "Bookmark this link" dialog.
The history information isn't associated with bookmarks, and isn't presented with them. And while we're talking about history: Vimperators 'u' "un-close tab" feature is absolutely golden.
The bookmarks download feature is more a "sync", but _not_ to some named web service. I've always distrusted features such as this, especially where the mechanism isn't documented. Could just be me not knowing now the feature works.
Firefox is not library management software Honestly: I'm starting to think it should be. Or that if I found something that was it would replace FF for me (Chrome + Readability largely is given lists, tags, and responsiveness).
Other control keybindings often interfere with windowmanger bindings I've been using for well over a decade. The number of competing sets of controls when you start embedding viewers in apps in webpages in browsers in window managers is pretty bad.
Or I misunderstand what you're talking about.
Responsiveness being : it takes too long to a) switch tabs b) open a new tab c) access a menu (e.g. File/Whatever). The UI might take a second or more to respond. I might have 50 tabs open spread over 5-6 windows.
Currently, the browser is running well and I suspect the most recent responsiveness trouble was caused by an add-on (Brief - feed reader) which I have disabled.
But I second the call for a better way to identify badly behaving tabs (CPU as well as RAM) more easily.
Firefox is a great browser and thanks to all who make it.
* if you haven't used it yet look at the barTab lite x addon,
* I also try to use RSS readers for sites I regularly visit
* I use Clearly (I don't know if it's as good as readability but it also allows me to clip to evernote)
I've considered RSS readers. I'm a bit torn between those and other forms of accessing stories of interest. I've yet to find a reader (local client) which really fits my workflow. Though I haven't looked overly hard either.
I never see much innovation with the actual browser UIs. The rendering engines get plenty of love, while something like the UI for Firefox has barely changed at all.
I used to have an aging powerpc, and Firefox would bring it to it's knees. But I think I was abusing it. Firebug, Flash, JS and too many tabs were the main culprits. And I have sinced tried to change my habits.
I think tabs are heavily used and abused! I personally believe that they are so popular because the bookmark UIs are so sucky. Most tabs could be replaced by a bookmark.
Tabs bring other problems, resizing the browser window in one tab, effects all the others. Tabs have inconsistant behaviour between different applications. Windows should be left to a window manager IMHO.
Now I try and keep my tabs to a minimum. Two or three. Any page I think I might want to read later I once bookmarked (to one day sort through...), but now I send to readability to read later at my leisure.
My main browser I have configured to make reading on it more pleasurable. I've throw away the page author's styles, and instead opt to use my own font, font size and colour scheme. I block adverts. And block flash. Layouts can suffer, but if I have to, I resort to using another browser. I did have JS turned off completely, but I am finding that increasingly difficult.
In terms of design trends - responsive web pages are quite welcome in my world. I think people will soon hunger for simpler pages and simpler sites. Something that's far easier to use. And I welcome the day that I can actually surf web pages comfortably on my TV when sitting on my arse.
Some sites are still very difficult to use, and the browser UIs could really lend a hand here.
Let me guess, you're another person who hasn't used Firefox in a few years hasn't bothered to check out the latest versions at all? :)
That said, the developer tools (both Firebug and the newer native ones) are really just not on par with Chrome now. I know they have people working on it, so I am looking forward to what they come up with.
And yes, I am using the latest build, I check about:memory regularly, stripped out the unneeded add-ons, but maybe I've just got too much stuff open and those pages have lots of script activity.
Is my usage the issue or is there something that can be improved in my scenario?
There can be a very drastic difference between "virtual memory made visible to a process" and "physical memory actually used by a process", especially in the context of shared memory systems where you have 5+ processes that are able to share much of their text and data segments.
I don't have Firefox here so I forget, but does their about:memory page show the "proportional" memory usage? KDE's KSysGuard has a detailed memory usage calculator that can display stats like that.
While I feel Mozilla has tried to address the memory leaks, I still think there is a lot of memory bloat for my usage.
What extensions do you have? I've also disable Java, Shockwave, etc. Try Nightly? I've never had a single stability issue.
Other people mentioned the about:memory tab. Taking a look at it now, I'm seeing about 80-100MB difference between what that tab say and what the activity monitor says.
I run nightly and I don't use addons beyond adblock and don't run flash so perhaps my experiences are different, but I haven't had problems with Firefox leaking memory in a couple years. The profiling tools at about:memory may let you see where things are breaking.
├───68.22 MB (28.62%) -- window-objects │ ├──41.12 MB (17.25%) -- top(https://twitter.com/, id=55)/active │ │ ├──39.86 MB (16.72%) -- window(https://twitter.com/) │ │ │ ├──18.17 MB (07.62%) -- js │ │ │ │ ├──18.13 MB (07.61%) -- compartment(https://twitter.com/)
Just to run Twitter uses a ton of memory?
So yeah, running twitter uses a ton of memory....
I don't know much about this Health Report and memory leaks, but one the blogs on MemShrink said that to fix memory issues (leaks and memory bloat), they needed to measure what and how Firefox is using memory. There is now an about:memory page the gives a great breakdown, though it is very dev oriented and easy to copy/paste into bugs.
One of the big items that caused memory leaks is plugins. With FF15[3], made a change to find a very common type of leak with plugins that and free that memory.
If you haven't tried seriously FF in the past year, then give it another go. It is much better.
[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memshrink/ [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/07/19/firefox-15-p...
...and it worked
But it will help them identify and fix current and future leaks.