Why I am Dumping Firefox

Joe Average said:
Looking over this guy's site it's patently obvious that he's peppered his "146 articles" with the big keywords so as to attract as much search ranking hits as possible. The quality of his writing is... ugh, and it's just so wrong it's not even funny.

Damn.
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That was pretty much what I got out of this as well..Well that and "My computer is shitty so I randomly hate new software". :rolleyes:
 
I've stayed on 3.x. Too many of my extensions are busted under 4.0.

I hate IE with a passion. I hate everything about the way it works, the interface, everything. I'll use a text based Browser before I use IE. Hell, I might even use Safari :)
 
cowgod said:
Even with Firefox being the memory hog that it is, I prefer it over Chrome and IE9. I can't live without my extensions.
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same.

FF does tend to use more memory than other browsers, but I have 4gb to spare :) so it's really a non-issue. Besides, I like the layout of FF3 more. Using Chrome (and FF4's new UI for that matter) feels un-natural.
 
i run ie, firefox, chrome, and opera. i switch it up based on what i need to do.

opera is my main browser. i like that i can keep tabs open, close the browser out, and the tabs will be there again, refreshing each page. firefox doesnt do that and i have yet to find out how. if there's a way to do this under ff4, i might switch back to it.
 
Joe Average said:
It's not a 512MB machine, folks. It's 1GB as I noted earlier, look at the pic:

dumpingfirefox01.jpg


Note the first 10 apps or so, that's about ~500MB of RAM usage just for those alone, and he's got 78 processes going to make up the rest, and it's showing 54% Physical Memory in use... so it's a 1GB box, perhaps even 1.25GB maybe.

Funny, sure. Sad, most definitely. :D
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It looks like firefox, or an extension, has a memory leak too.
 
Firefox is still better to me. I use both but i use firefox more due to more features and easier access at the menus and everything. More extensions in firefox than chrome. I prefer features over simplicity.
 
Sabrewulf165 said:
If 234 MB is half of his system memory, he should probably get a new computer.
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This by a mile! I will not say that FF is light on memory but for the most part I couldn't care less. Right now I have a crap ton of tabs open (190) and FF would have been running for a week now if it hadn't crashed today (there is something up with the build I was on) chrome can not do that, I am not sure about IE9 which I can't use at work but more than 15 tabs open for a day would make it die. As for speed I do not find chrome faster than FF4

FF4 does have some issues, for one it can't handle too many tabs, I at home can't get it to load near 100 and if it gets to taking about 1.6 GB of ram it just dies. Clicking the tab bar area doesn't bring up a new tab its considered the title area so it toggles full sized window.

So while his 4 tabs is taking around 256 my 190 is taking 999,258 at the moment.
 
Hmm...I have several gigabytes of RAM in all my computers, and I'm not often using a laptop from 2001, so I guess his primary complaint doesn't really resound with me.
 
Firefox and Opera are both good in my opinion, my FF4 loads very fast with ~50 tabs and several extensions, ~15 or so, but that may be due to my SSD and the fact I have 12gb of ram. I like chrome but its not very customizable and I dont like how it does downloads.
 
I cannot take advice from someone who lets quicktime lauch buttons run by default on startup, same with itunes helper. Both do absolutly nothing but help itunes launch a little faster.
 
I was disappointed with Firefox 4 as well. Not enough to change it, but I did spend the first couple of days customizing it back to the way 3.6 used to look/feel/work for me. After doing all that, it's almost a technicality that I am using FF4 because I've changed it as much as I can to behave like 3.6.

As for the memory issue, it doesn't bother me too much. I'm not going to miss the 200-400MB RAM it uses up, but I have to say, it does make me wonder when Chrome will take up 40MB and this will take up 300. Is it bad programming or is it doing a lot more or what?
 
And just as a final nail in the coffin, somewhat, here's the latest Chromium build as of an hour ago (13.0.748) with 10 tabs open, very common ones like this forum, MSN.com, Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia, Blue's News, Shacknews, and AccuWeather:

chromium.png


Those 10 tabs open (and that guy said he's got anywhere from 1 to 20 at any given time so it could be double this) consume ~440MB already...

And as far as Windows 7 running slow with 1GB, it's nowhere near as bad as Vista:

evenmoreamazingramusage.png


That's Windows 7 Pro on a 512MB laptop recently for testing. Was kinda shocked to see it scale itself down so well, and even when I fired of Firefox 3.6.16 on it and hit a few sites, even YouTube, the machine ran far far better than I ever expected even with so little physical RAM in the machine.

Simply amazing stuff...
 
dr.stevil said:
FF does tend to use more memory than other browsers
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No, it doesn't. Which is why this article is hilariously retarded. The author complains Firefox 4 uses too much memory, then switches to a browser that uses *MORE* memory. Firefox stopped leaking memory in the 2.x days, and became the most memory efficient browser in the 3.x days. Firefox 4 continues the trend of using the least amount of memory of the modern browsers.

http://www.techtree.com/India/Reviews/Mozilla_Firefox_4_Review/551-114892-597-4.html
114892_ram2.jpg


http://www.zdnet.co.uk/reviews/busi...chmark-battle-chrome-ie-and-firefox-40092322/
ff4memory.jpg


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/...irefox-4-vs-internet-explorer-9_n_841320.html
Rosenblatt then loaded the same six websites and examined each browser's memory usage. Again, Firefox 4 was the champ, utilizing the least amount of memory (148,020 kb) during the test. IE9 followed with 205,616 kb used. Chrome required the most memory (390,532 kb) to complete this task.
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The only reason people think Chrome doesn't use much memory is because it is divided across a bunch of processes and they are too lazy to actually add it up.
 
I typically run with anywhere from 1 to 20 tabs open at any given time....

....I just can't seem to get past half of my system memory being used by my browser....
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The graphic provided in the article shows 236 MB of RAM being used.
1) If 236 MB is approximately "half" of your "system memory," then maybe you might want to look at updating your ten-year-old PC with only 512 MB of RAM before you start complaining about the browser's performance.

2) If you are going to be a browser whore (someone who notoriously has more than 7 tabs open at any given time), as I too am a self-prophessed browser whore, then you shouldn't expect exceptional memory performance. I am currently typing this with 15 tabs open, using over half a gig of RAM. The benefit is that with Chrome, I know exactly WHICH tab is causing the memory hog. But I don't expect each tab to be under 5 MB of Memory usage. I understand that I'm doing it to myself.

3) I switched from Firefox to Chrome for page load speed, not for memory usage. I'm not saying that memory usage isn't a problem, I just saying that there are few differences between the browsers when it comes to memory usage. One difference I HAVE experienced is that IE 8 was better at handling Flash than the early days of FF 3. In those days, FF did suffer from a major memory leak when working with Flash (don't know if it was Adobe or FF, but the problem showed up as a FF process).
 
Joe Average said:
It's not a 512MB machine, folks. It's 1GB as I noted earlier, look at the pic:

dumpingfirefox01.jpg


Note the first 10 apps or so, that's about ~500MB of RAM usage just for those alone, and he's got 78 processes going to make up the rest, and it's showing 54% Physical Memory in use... so it's a 1GB box, perhaps even 1.25GB maybe.

Funny, sure. Sad, most definitely. :D
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Look at all the crap applications that are running in the background. He could keep FF and disable half of those little systray "helper" apps and be fine.
 
Joe Average said:
It's not a 512MB machine, folks. It's 1GB as I noted earlier, look at the pic:

dumpingfirefox01.jpg


Note the first 10 apps or so, that's about ~500MB of RAM usage just for those alone, and he's got 78 processes going to make up the rest, and it's showing 54% Physical Memory in use... so it's a 1GB box, perhaps even 1.25GB maybe.

Funny, sure. Sad, most definitely. :D
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My guess is that, judging by the Synaptics software process running in the task manager, the "article"'s author did this on a low-end laptop or a netbook. With that, I'll take any tech insight they give with a trainload of salt...
 
FireFox uses more than all other major browsers combined for me. Also when it gets bloated it becomes extremely sluggish.

firefox_wtf.jpg


firefox_152pm.jpg
 
I've yet to crash in FF4. Other than the font rendering on my desktop machine, I've had very little issues with the browser so far. Yes, I have seen it's memory usage go above 512MB on occasion, but that might be because I either have a lot of tabs open pointing to content heavy sites or the fact that one of the extensions I use (DownloadHelper) is on their "Hall of Shame" list.
 
kllrnohj said:
No, it doesn't. Which is why this article is hilariously retarded. The author complains Firefox 4 uses too much memory, then switches to a browser that uses *MORE* memory. Firefox stopped leaking memory in the 2.x days, and became the most memory efficient browser in the 3.x days. Firefox 4 continues the trend of using the least amount of memory of the modern browsers.

The only reason people think Chrome doesn't use much memory is because it is divided across a bunch of processes and they are too lazy to actually add it up.
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Not from my experience. On a fresh boot (with fresh webpages), FF tends to use less memory, as your benchmarks would indicate.

However, I rarely restart my computer (just Sleep it every night) until MS patch Tuesdays every month. FF got to be abysmally high memory utilization (upwards of 2-3 GB) versus Chrome being consistently around ~400 MB with ~10 tabs open. I've started using IE9 and although the initial memory utilization is high, it doesn't balloon to FF levels. Speedwise, all the browsers are about the same on my system (whereas IE8 definitely felt slower).
 
There's no doubt Chrome uses more memory (I have plenty of RAM), but that's also because it's faster. I can literally see the crawl of Firefox when I'm browsing - there's just no comparison to Chrome. Also, I'm not quite sure what the hell they mean by "boot time"? Chrome loads in about 2 seconds for me after any reboot, which is about as cold as it gets. Maybe they should review these browsers on a system that isn't a total piece of shit, or better yet find reviewers who know what the hell they're doing. I wonder if that's something [H]ardOCP would like to get into?
 
LOL, I was watching FF4 eating memory yesterday (1.2GB and increasing). The tab causing the problem was classic yahoo mail just sitting on the inbox screen, no flash or anything. I leave the same task running on IE9 and Chrome/Iron all the time with no problems.

Right now the firefox.exe task is up to 1.7GB for absolutely no reason. Time to take it out back and shoot it. Seriously, I'm about to uninstall FF4 and just use Safari for this ridiculously simple task. FailFox.
 
talon_262 said:
My guess is that, judging by the Synaptics software process running in the task manager, the "article"'s author did this on a low-end laptop or a netbook. With that, I'll take any tech insight they give with a trainload of salt...
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I have Synaptics installed on my TM2 because I need it for the mutitouch gestures e.g. two finger scrolling. Not "low-end" per se.

Might be a different story if it were Elantech or worse, ALPs.
 
Sgraffite said:
FireFox uses more than all other major browsers combined for me. Also when it gets bloated it becomes extremely sluggish.

firefox_wtf.jpg


firefox_152pm.jpg
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I use FF for everything at home and at work and I've never seen that. What are you doing? How many tabs? What addons you using?
 
So, if I were to load up the exact same page(s) and got results that were 180 degrees in the opposite direction - no excessive memory usage, no sluggish performance, etc - which machine configuration has the problem if the browser and the loaded content is exactly the same?

I gotta wonder sometimes...
 
I think the author is pointing his finger at the wrong source. He shouldn't be blaming the browser for supporting such technology such as Flash, Javascript etc.. He should be blaming the people that made these technologies. Of course if the author craves his old BBS stomping grounds as opposed to the vast rich and well designed webpages of today he can fire up that old 14.4 and go back to the days of the cave.
The author is just being un-realistic.

"So that's it, I've had it with the Internet, it takes too much Memory to run on my E-machine I bought on clearance from Best Buy three years ago, I'm going back to my 486 with 14.4Kbit modem to surf throughout BBS land" <Gets on Unicorn> Away Sparticus, take me to the land of rainbows!
 
Joe Average said:
HAHAHA Ok, that one set me off on a chuckle fit... nicely done. :)
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:D

My personal experience: Chrome has fast as hell separate processes, consumes same amount of memory approximately to Firefox. Chrome doesn't have Adblock or NoScript (to my knowledge). Firefox has slower child threads all parent to firefox main process.
 
soulman901 said:
I think the author is pointing his finger at the wrong source. He shouldn't be blaming the browser for supporting such technology such as Flash, Javascript etc.. He should be blaming the people that made these technologies. Of course if the author craves his old BBS stomping grounds as opposed to the vast rich and well designed webpages of today he can fire up that old 14.4 and go back to the days of the cave.
The author is just being un-realistic.

"So that's it, I've had it with the Internet, it takes too much Memory to run on my E-machine I bought on clearance from Best Buy three years ago, I'm going back to my 486 with 14.4Kbit modem to surf throughout BBS land" <Gets on Unicorn> Away Sparticus, take me to the land of rainbows!
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Give him a windows port of lynx.

Ought to be fast enough, right?
 
WasntMe said:
I use FF for everything at home and at work and I've never seen that. What are you doing? How many tabs? What addons you using?
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Number of tabs was 4 on the Win XP machine, but it is irrelevant. FireFox just grows and grows the longer I leave it open.
I'm doing web development, and I always leave all of the browsers open.
Addons are: Web Developer, FireBug, NoScript, PageSpeed, Tamper Data, and User Agent Switcher.

I have a hunch it's a memory leak related to FireBug.
 
NoScript in conjunction with adblock+ I find to be the worse culprits for memory usage.

Without them Firefox tops out usually under 300mb, with them I'm typically seeing 600-700mb being used. And this usage seems to grow as time goes by and my exception list grows.

That being said Firefox, much like Windows 7, releases that memory when something else asks for it. If I open Photoshop up and get it using 3gb or so Firefox will slim down to around 100mb but it also slows down as well from it.
 
I've used Firefox since version 0.7 and I've have never experienced any major problem with memory usage. There are other issues however. Over the past couple of years they have removed or changed a lot of useful features and they seem to be obsessed with imitating Chrome, which is really stupid.
 
Apparently he hasn't checked to see how much memory IE 8 uses compared to FF 3 :rolleyes: IE 8 is a huge memory hog!
 
GushpinBob said:
I have Synaptics installed on my TM2 because I need it for the mutitouch gestures e.g. two finger scrolling. Not "low-end" per se.

Might be a different story if it were Elantech or worse, ALPs.
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Sorry, I meant "low-end" as in a laptop that's either ancient, cheap (1 GB of RAM nowadays? C'mon, spring for a little more RAM there!), or both of the above.
 
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