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Comment by ajays | Hacker News Reader

I wish they (FF) would also spend some time on the small annoyances:

Lack of a restart button. Now when I upgrade FF, I have to "kill -9" it from my terminal to get it to restore windows upon restart

Memory leaks. Leave yourself logged in to Facebook for a few days, and watch it take up 2GB of memory.

No way to easily filter sites with cookies like you can in the next tab over, where you manage sites with saved passwords. Why is this? Does FF secretly want you to not muck with cookies?

Now, I'm sure there are addons and plugins for the above. But I should _not_ need addons for basic UX. Save the addons for fancier stuff.

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* For the restart after upgrade, either it is a bug, or you have not seen the little "restore tabs from last time" button in the lower right part of the browser.

* I have not experienced that, I don't use Facebook.

* For the cookie stuff, you'll be pleased to learn about the about:permissions feature (type it in your address bar).

Whoa, about:permissions is awesome. Thanks for that!

  I have not experienced that, I don't use Facebook.

"Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Use Facebook"

> about:permissions

Interesting, thanks. But while it's open, the list of sites keeps growing for me, apparently various shady/malware sites get added at the bottom continuously. I haven't managed to find it why this happens, but I'm guessing that it may have something to do with the "safe browsing" feature, perhaps all sites in the blacklist get added to about:permissions for some obscure reason. Any ideas?

>Leave yourself logged in to Facebook for a few days, and watch it take up 2GB of memory.

It's entirely possible for a website to have a memory leak. (Or, at any rate, consume an ever increasing amount of memory.) If closing the tab and opening it again frees the memory, then there might not be anything FF can do about it. (It's also possible you've got an addon causing the problem.)

Doesn't FB constantly update the feed? If you leave the feed open, won't the page grow unbounded? Seems like it's working as intended...

It doesn't remove the oldest items? (I really don't know, I only visit Facebook for about an hour at a time at the most.)

Facebook indeed has a long history of really dumb memory leaks that browsers can't do anything about, combined with memory leaks that are exacerbated by browser bugs and require improvements to garbage collectors and stuff. It's rough.

>lack of a restart button.

I don't think Chrome has one. Anyway, either press shift+f2 to bring up the Developer Toolbar and type "restart", or install an addon like Restartless Restart (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/restartless-r...).

You can also just go into the settings, and set "When Firefox starts:" to "Show my windows and tabs from last time".

And I don't see why a "normal" user should want a default button in the UI to restart the browser.

>Memory leaks

The situation is much better now, there still are some leaks here and there, but nothing huge, at least with my usage (I usually restart my browser every 1-2 days to update to the latest Nightly, and have about 50 tabs open).

The team responsible for memory leaks is the MemShrink team, you can see their progress here: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/

I'd also suggest to install the addon "about:addons-memory", and see if any of your addons is leaking memory (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/about-addons-...)

If you still see memory leaks, please report them on bugzilla.

>Cookies

While something like this would be nice, I don't think that "normal users" needs to mess up with Cookies.

If you're a power user, and want to enable/disable cookies on a per-sites base, install an addon that let you do it.

I'm personally very happy with Cookie Controller: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-contro...

After chrome upgrades itself, a "Restart Chrome" button appears in the "About Chrome" window.

So does Firefox.

First image found on Google: http://www.techapna.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Restart-T...

If you go to Help > About Firefox when there's an update to be installed, there's a restart button that restores tabs.

As for memory leaks, it's been a project for a while now: https://areweslimyet.com/

I'm not entirely sure what the third point is referring to (I just let the browser handle cookies), but in the Privacy tab of Options, you can view and remove individual cookies and search by site. So maybe that helps with what you want?

I think Facebook itself has the memory leak: I never leave it open for more than about an hour at a time, but I've heard from people that leave it open for days that it can take up between 1 and 2 GB; some of these people use Firefox, some Chrome and some Safari.

In "general" under "preferences", you can select whether the browser restores tabs from last time it was exited. Maybe that somehow get set to something besides "Show my windows and tabs from last time"?

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