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Erunnoon Just Scroll

I doubt that the patch helps in this particular case as all images are present in the DOM, so Firefox will merrily load all of the images, independent of whether they are visible or not. This has been a longstanding architectural problem.

Erunnoon Just Scroll

No, by their own admission Firefox just sucks at displaying pages with a lot of images such as this one [1].

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=683284

Erunnoon Product Design at Mozilla

Mea culpa, I didn't want to steal the thunder from the great guys at Opera. From my end user perspective I only remember Opera supporting the <video> tag in a version which was released almost a year after Firefox 3.5 [1].

[1] http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/introduction-html5-video/

Erunnoon Product Design at Mozilla

I know I start sounding like a broken record for those who read my comments regularly in these kind of threads, but I always feel inclined to point out that Chrome's much-lauded architecture has clear limitations once you start to push it too hard. I'm certainly not a typical user as I exhibit heavy tab usage. And I've used Chrome for weeks at times as my primary browser so I've come to know its advantages and disadvantages. Web pages may be given their own processes but they are not completely isolated from the browser process (containing the UI) since they have to communicate in order for the user to have something to see and interact with. And there are bottle-necks in the browser process. With too many open, active tabs the interface starts to stall badly. And the memory usage goes through the roof which causes the OS to swap pages from other applications out of memory which really hampers performance of the entire system. Chrome is optimized for the common case (very few tabs) but it doesn't scale well (i.e. at all) beyond this.

Whatever Mozilla will do to lessen the impact of content on the interface, I hope that they won't go down the same disastrous path as Chrome and make the browser unusable for any use other than the browser is optimized for. Right now I can have ~100 tabs open with Firefox thanks to excellent memory usage (including suspending tabs) and an interfaces which scales well (Panorama, switch to tab, tab overflow, etc.)

But I can see why Chrome is so attractive for many users. If you stay within its comfort zone the responsiveness is extremely pleasant in day-to-day usage.

Erunnoon Product Design at Mozilla

Firebug is most likely the culprit [1]. Firefox 15 will have a general fix for the kind of memory leaks such as the one caused by Firebug (affectionately called "Hueyfix" after its inventor Kyle Huey by some) [2].

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669730 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=695480

Erunnoon Product Design at Mozilla

This is probably why so many features from Mozilla end up in other browsers:

-Notification bar in pretty much all browsers.

-Doorhanger panels

-Download pane which Safari managed to release first (unfortunately a common pattern)

-HTML5 video which Mozilla implemented first

-Do not track

-AwesomeBar which now all other browsers emulate with different degrees of success.

-Firebug which set the standard for web development tools.

And so on, and so on. The other browsers also contribute great innovations to the browser space and this is a great situation for the end user, but I don't really like how Mozilla is kept getting downplayed.

Erunnoon Memshrink's 1st birthday

Unfortunately one misbehaving extension is enough to break Firefox' memory usage. I ran a fresh profile without any extensions for a few days recently and it was a marvel: Firefox kept releasing all memory immediately once I closed tabs.

Erunnoon Chrome limits off-store extension installs

Unfortunately Google's policy doesn't cause only malicious extensions to be removed from their web store. For instance, All Mangas Reader, a combined reader and management tool for online manga sites, was removed from the store for "copyright infringement", although it's the sites that are hosting the mangas doing the infringement and not the extension. Additionally, the copyright problem does not apply to all jurisdictions where the store is accessible. ChromedBird, a Twitter client extension, was also removed because Google didn't like that it contained the "chrome" string (at least this problem was easily alleviated by changing the name to SilverBird).

As long as it's still possible to install non-webstore extensions I'll learn to live with that restrictions as it's not an activity I perform often in the first place.

Erunnoon Firefox 13 Released - Homepage + Speed Improvements

FWIW if you switch Firefox to small icon mode, hide the addon bar (previously status bar) and the bookmark bar, then Firefox only has a few vertical pixel less than Chrome for the content area. That's how I use my Firefox at least.

Erunnoon Firefox 13 Released - Homepage + Speed Improvements

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=257061

The bug is 8 years old and nobody seems to be working on it. I wouldn't hold my breath that it will be fixed soon.

Erunnoon Firefox 13 Released - Homepage + Speed Improvements

Depending on the site page loading can still badly affect interface responsiveness. There are a number of projects to alleviate this under the umbrella of the Snappy project[1] but for all the work the Mozilla devs have have put into it, Firefox as of now (Fx13) is still nowhere near as smooth as its biggest competitor for regular use cases. I'm hoping that the SuperSnappy research project[2] will produce usable results though.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Snappy [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=718121

Erunnoon Firefox 13 Released - Homepage + Speed Improvements

"I think it's a bit more resource-hungry than Chrome"

Depends on what you measure and your usage patterns. Firefox runs circles around Chrome with regards to memory usage and features like "load tabs on demand" can further lower the general resource usage drastically.

The lack of native UI styling of 'select' elements is a disgrace though, especially on Mac. Firefox is the last browser to exhibit this and there are no sign that this will changed in the near future. :-(

Erunnoon Firefox 13 Released - Homepage + Speed Improvements

No, it has nothing to do with loyalty but with utility and how you weigh the different feature sets of each browser (speed et al. being features as well for the sake of this discussion). I find such claims disingenuous because they assume that Chrome can act as a drop-in replacement for Firefox which can be trivially shown not to be true. You seem to compare the browsers from the point of shared features or features exclusive to Chrome which understandably can lead to wrong conclusions about Firefox users.

Chrome's features don't constitute a superset of Firefox features and vice versa. Examples for features exclusive to Firefox:

1) Tab groups 2) Awesomebar (which works very differently than the Omnibar) 3) History sync 4) Load tabs on demand 5) Bookmark tags 6) Livemarks 7) Better resource usage (especially memory)

And I could easily add several more, both native as well as the ones added by extensions. You may not care about some or all of these features because they don't fit into your browser usage pattern, but others do. Speed is also important to me and I'm glad that Firefox gets improved with each new version currently but it's not the deciding criteria as long as it doesn't inhibit me from using the browser as I wish.

Erunnoon Firefox 13 Released - Homepage + Speed Improvements

Once SPDYv3 is enabled in a release channel the Chrome installations which only support an outdated SPDY version will rise suddenly if the current update trend is not reversed in a future version.

Erunnoon Firefox 13 Released - Homepage + Speed Improvements

SPDY is in a better position to dictate the development of HTTP 2.0 as there are already two independent implementation in the wild, unlike S+M which so far only exists as a concept paper AFAIK.

Erunnoon Why new Firefox 13 'load tabs on demand' is bad UX.

The problem with Chrome not having such an option is not just limited to startup time when restoring a session. Having too many open tabs causes the resource consumption to go through the roof (especially RAM and CPU cycles). I can easily have several hundreds of tabs in Firefox (in combination with tab groups) because I usually use different small subsets of tabs during my sessions so the resource usage is quite manageable.

I've said it times and again: Chrome is optimized for a single use case (i.e. few tab users) at which it excels but tends to break down quickly once you leave its comfort zone, unless you have a fairly powerful system. Maybe the project leader nudge, nudge could divert some resources to make Chrome scale better. ;-)

Erunnoon Firefox 13 Released - Homepage + Speed Improvements

Apparently not. There's an ever growing tail of users who get stuck with an outdated version [1]. It's not as bad as Firefox yet but surprising nonetheless given how much effort Google put into Chrome's update system.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/may-br...

Erunnoon WebGL: 30,000 particles + Gestures = More Fun

Why is this marked as "Chrome only"? I can't spot any errors with Firefox 13.

Erunnoon NASA can now predict Andromeda collision with certainty

Earth will easily survive humanity, even if we carpet bomb the surface with nuclear weapons. Even life is very likely to survive in its own niches as it has done during past global catastrophes. So worrying about earth is unwarranted in my opinion. Humans should be mostly concerned about their own species surviving in the foreseeable future. And so far I do not see any imminent danger of that happening, especially with our masterfully understanding to adapt our environments to suit our needs. But developments like global warming could lead to some drastic population swings in the future (e.g. via wars, famine, etc.).

Oh, and live will be gone on earth anyway, AFAIK in about 1 billion years when the sun has become so luminous that the oceans on earth will vaporize and ultimately escape into space. And the collision between the galaxies will very likely have no immediate effect on our solar system due to the vast space between stars (and therefore planets).

Erunnoon VLC has been downloaded over a billion times

I'll just add another data point. After the release of VLC 2.0 I was slightly dissatisfied with the new interface on OS X and used the opportunity to try out a couple of alternative players. In the end I stuck with MPlayerX because of short startup time and the minimalistic interface. But it was only a short love affair. The keyboard controls are pretty much non-existent, it can't open DVD menus, it only shows half the available duration of some of my music DVD rips (dual-layer?!?) and I have some occasional weird timing issues with regard to subtitles (image and subtitles suddenly not in sync). In the end I returned to VLC and all of my issues disappeared.

So kudos to the VLC team for producing such a great product (despite some questionable interface decisions). I'll take a player which "just works" over the pretty and shiny competitors every day.

Erunnoon Is aging a disease?

1. Nature is not "smart", it is not a conscious entity. So neither can we outsmart it nor can it outsmart us. 2. I strongly dislike the dichotomy between nature and humans. Our species is part of the natural world same as any other. Investigating into influencing or even controlling our evolution means we are making good use of our evolutionary advantages (i.e. the highly evolved brain).

Erunnoon Is aging a disease?

Humans, due to their highly evolved brains, have accumulated such a vast amount of knowledge that we can adapt our environment to suit our needs as we have been doing for the past centuries. And if our understanding of genetics deepens to the point where we can directly manipulate our biology we won't need the comparably crude trial and error methodology that is mutation and selection anymore. This would still fall under the evolutionary advantage our brains give us.

Erunnoon Firefox finally plugs the leak

Yeah, there are probably several factors which assisted Chrome's rise to prominence. Obviously Google's huge marketing power and their bundling deals can't be disregarded easily but in the end Chrome is also a great product. It's fast (real and perceived performance), it has a remarkably polished primary UI (though some of the secondary UIs like history are rather suboptimal) and has neat features which only get slowly adopted by the competitors (e.g. ingenious tab closing behavior, built-in translator, built-in PDF reader, etc.). So great product + good marketing = success.

And the importance of geek/early adopter/enthusiast users shouldn't be underestimated because these are the ones who often have wide reach (e.g. journalists, bloggers, etc.) or are responsible for how web technologies are used (e.g. developers). It's a bitter lesson the non-WebKit browsers vendors had to learn after most mobile web developers started to target only WebKit because that's the devices/browsers they are using on a day-to-day basis. And in its early days Mozilla thrived on the free guerrilla marketing provided by enthusiast users, not just in their immediate private space but also in magazines, on websites and other outlets where users and authors were constantly praising Firefox for its security, speed and features compared to IE6. Today that place has been mostly taken over by Chrome.

I still having a hard time wrapping my head around how badly Mozilla handled the appearance of Chrome for years. The threat was so obvious from the very beginning and not just in hindsight. As I said, I have the impression that they are on the right track now but there must be lessons to be learned from the 2008 to 2011 period for Mozilla itself and other organizations in similar situations. I wish Mozilla higher-ups would sit together and publish a retrospective about what they perceive they did right and wrong.

Erunnoon Firefox finally plugs the leak

"You can tell if an extension is using the Jetpack API if it doesn't require a browser restart to install."

Not necessarily. "Traditional" extensions can be extended to support being restartless as well if they implement the necessary hooks.

Erunnoon Firefox finally plugs the leak

IIRC both Google's and Mozilla's browser metrics showed that a vast majority of users (>90%) never open more than 5 tabs simultaneously. Chrome is optimized for this use case, both from a memory as well as interface perspective. So for most users it works very well, better than the competition I daresay. Unfortunately it tends to completely break down once you go too far out of its comfort zone (i.e. using many tabs). Unless you have immense amounts of memory (> 4 GB) the gigantic memory use will not only affect Chrome itself but also all other programs as the OS starts swapping their pages onto the hard disk (which have to be swapped back upon access which is slow). Additionally, the interface was clearly never intended to be used with too many tabs as it lacks any kind of tab overflow concept. And the interface starts to lack badly which for me is an indication that there are bottlenecks in the single browser process which handles the UI.

Firefox behaves far more gracefully in less regular use cases. With tab groups, switch-to-tab, don't load until selected and tab overflow I can easily have dozens of open tabs without affecting the performance of Firefox and the system too much while remaining quite convenient to use. Mozilla just has to improve the regular use case to be in a better competitive position. Once they've achieved this Firefox will be usable by a far wider range of possible users than Chrome.

Oh, and one of the reasons for Chrome's success (besides the sneaky bundling stuff) is probably the extremely convenient silent updater. I've installed Chrome on many computers which belong to people with little technical knowledge so I wouldn't have to bother with browser updates (users have no say in this) and outdated Flash versions (since it is bundled). Now, the latter reason wouldn't be necessary if Adobe wouldn't be such a bag of fail but that's another topic.

Erunnoon Firefox finally plugs the leak

Yeah, hopefully this will not go down in history as another too little, too late effort. Firefox still has a sizable market share of about 20%-25% (depending on the source) so Mozilla can still flex some muscle to keep the web open. I dread the day when only cooperate players are left to decide about the future of web technologies.

I wonder how the situation would look today if the MemShrink and Snappy projects had been started in 2009 or 2010 at the latest. My gut feeling tells me that the loss of market share and especially mindshare wouldn't have been as dramatic as it is today. Oh well, I'm happy that Mozilla apparently got their act together and taking the competition more seriously. Right now it's fun looking forward to each next Firefox version. :-)

Erunnoon Firefox finally plugs the leak

"I'm unsure of whether the remaining 90% is due to DOM interaction, rendering, or just perceived crappiness but it exists nonetheless."

A mix of all of that. For the DOM part Mozilla is developing new bindings (called Paris bindings) to close the performance gap compared to the competition [1]. Johnny Stenbeck has written two articles which give an interesting insight into past, present and future DOM bindings in Gecko [2][3]. Azure is Mozilla's new rendering API which even in its infancy showed some promising performance improvements [4][5]. Unfortunately work on Azure hasn't been progressing as fast as I had hoped. AFAIK only the canvas element is currently using Azure for rendering, the rest (ui + content) is still based on legacy APIs. On the JavaScript front there's IonMonkey, a brand new JIT compiler developed from scratch [6]. It's still in ongoing development and lacks many optimizations so right now it's slower than Mozilla's current JIT compilers in many tests [7].

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580070 [2] http://jstenback.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/history-of-mozilla... [3] http://jstenback.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/new-dom-bindings/ [4] http://blog.mozilla.org/joe/2011/04/26/introducing-the-azure... [5] http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/comparing-performance-a... [6] https://wiki.mozilla.org/IonMonkey [7] http://arewefastyet.com/?a=b&view=regress

Erunnoon Firefox: Not A Good Citizen on OS X Lion

Agreed. I wish Mozilla would have left an option to retain the current behavior, even if buried in about:config. Lions native fullscreen mode is so much fail it's almost unbelievable that it ever past any internal testing let alone be released to actual customers.

Erunnoon Mozilla: Are We Slim Yet?

Maybe Mozilla should consider creating arewetolerantyet.com in the light of Brendan Eich's donations to questionable political campaigns.

SCNR ;)

Erunnoon Google has released Dartium, a Chromium build with a Dart VM

Open source is not a specification. Imagine if JavaScript was specified as "what SpiderMonkey does". Then there's the issue that Google didn't make many friends by letting the other browser vendors in the dark until they had a more or less finished product. As a consequence the language has some rather questionable design decisions like the much discussed covariant array issue as well as purely syntactic ones. Additionally I'm rather sure that some browser vendors (especially Mozilla and Microsoft) are not so thrilled having to import and integrate a code base into their own products which is solely controlled by Google.