Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

[mgkimsal]

I'm reminded of MySQL.

"You don't have transaction support" "Sure we do - just handle it in your code" "But I need transactions" "No you don't! That's just overarchitecting!" "No really I do" "Look how fast we are!" ... years later... "Hey look at MySQL - We have transactions! Look how great we are!" etc.

I like FF. I use it. But every time there's some comment about FF memory, we usually see a bunch of people coming out saying they never see FF memory issues, the OP must be doing something wrong or have a bad system, they use their computer non-stop for 4 years without ever even seeing FF slow down, etc. Then endless discussion about "how can you even function having more than 2 tabs open? I always close all mine because of some cognition study from 1974 which I read in my one open tab, then closed it".

Now many of those same people will be spouting how great FF is because they've cut memory usage so much (and maybe how they'll venture in to the brave new world of 3-tabs-at-a-time).

End of the day, this is just how computer stuff goes - deny there's a problem, fix it, then promote how great your fix is. Just gets a bit tiresome.

Oh, and yes, I set up a bunch of strawmen up there. I love the smell of them burning in the morning.

[jmillikin]

  > I like FF. I use it. But every time there's some comment
  > about FF memory, we usually see a bunch of people coming
  > out saying they never see FF memory issues, the OP must be
  > doing something wrong or have a bad system, they use their
  > computer non-stop for 4 years without ever even seeing FF
  > slow down, etc.

That's because complaints about large memory use in Firefox fall into two camps, generally:

1. "I left Firefox on overnight with three tabs open, and now it's using 3.1 GiB of memory. This browser is terrible! Yes, I do have dozens of low-quality extensions installed, so?"

2. "I started Firefox, and already it's using over 300 MiB! That's insane! Why would a web browser ever use that much? I'm switching to Chrome, it only uses 100 MiB. What do you mean, 'multiple processes'?"

There may in fact be genuine issues buried somewhere in the discussion, but they're hard to discern against the general background noise.

  > Then endless discussion about "how can you even function
  > having more than 2 tabs open? I always close all mine
  > because of some cognition study from 1974 which I read in
  > my one open tab, then closed it".

You're getting confused between Firefox and Chrome. Firefox has always been the browser of choice for the "tons of tabs" crowd, because Chrome's process-per-tab model breaks down when there's more than a few dozen open.

For example, I have just over 70 tabs open right now, Firefox has been running for about a month, and it's at 1.1 GiB resident memory. Chrome becomes very unhappy under such circumstances (since it uses about ~100 MiB per tab), so I'm careful to only open a few tabs at a time.

[onemoreact]

You often see the same pattern with OS.

  User4,27,128: "I think there might be an issue."
  Fanboy37,652: "What are you talking about? This is the best thing ever!!!"  
  Fanboy23,418: "That easy to fix, just type everything backward while singing and it all works fine!!1!"
  ...
  Dev15: "Fixed problem 4,129"
  Fanboy37,652: "Now that that's fixed, this is the best thing ever!!1!"

[bzbarsky]

> we usually see a bunch of people coming out

None of whom are actually active Firefox or Gecko developers...

In other words, fanboys act like fanboys. Surprise!

[carussell]

That's interesting.

Because every time I've seen Mozilla developers making note of memory improvements over the last few years, I run into someone claiming that every time "Firefox" and "memory usage" came up prior to whichever is current for the time, the developers steadfastly denied a problem.

It's getting a bit like the mythical proslytizing vegan; I've run into far more people bitching about however many instances of fuss-making by however many hostile vegans than I have of actual hostile vegans. (The count of the latter can be described as "basically none".)

[sp332]

It's not that Firefox is actually using that much memory. It's not even that it has a memory leak in the usual sense of a broken garbage collector or something. It all down to memory fragmentation. You can see illustrations of browser memory fragmentation here: http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/10/memory-fragmentation/ Firefox switched to jemalloc in 2008, which cut memory usage to less than half. http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/

[capnrefsmmat]

Many of the Firefox 7 fixes that reduced memory usage did not have to do with fragmentation; there were a number of true memory leaks fixed, and other bugs where code was allocating more memory than it ever could need.

(For example, I think there was a bug where the find-as-you-type bar could keep the page in memory forever if it wasn't dismissed.)

[hack_edu]

Since when has Firefox/Mozilla NOT promised that their next release will manage memory better?

[capnrefsmmat]

They've started getting more serious about it. One of their big new JavaScript performance features, type inference, was backed out as soon as they realized it causes significantly increased memory usage -- and it won't get back in until it slims down, despite significant JS performance benefits. In the past, many features slipped in with memory problems and weren't noticed for months or years.

[andhow]

Umm, the claim wasn't speculative, it was measured on an aurora release that you can test out right now: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel.

[trustfundbaby]

I smirked at the headline when I saw it and I came here to say the same thing ... Every release they promise that firefox will use less memory ... hasn't happened yet AFAIK.

[drieddust]

I have switched to Firefox 8 nightly 64 bit 2 week and never turned back to stable release.

Firefox 8 is current state is performing an order of magnitude better than the current stable release.

They are definitely improving at an escalating pace ever since chrome and safari started eating into their market share.

[marckremers]

There's something inherently wrong about the headline of this. How did they get to such a high usage in the first place? They sacrificed performance for features, and now going back to clean up the mess. Not elegant. This is why I'm sticking with Chrome.

[oppositionradio]

I left firefox once and for all this week. its too bad, i like what the they are working with identity built into the browser.

[stanleydrew]

Chrome/ChromeOS/Chromium(OS) is working on identity built in to the browser as well via multiple profiles:

http://www.chromium.org/user-experience/multi-profiles

[callahad]

Can anyone explain why the explicit memory metrics apparently regress between Firefox 7 and Firefox 8?

[capnrefsmmat]

A bug in how they were counted in FF7:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=673851

[sliverstorm]

"up to 50% less"? That is a major weasel statement. It could use 1% less and still meet the "goal".

[starwed]

I think you misunderstood -- it's not a goal but a measurement.

The actual statement, if you read the original source[1], is

>Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less.

[1] http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/08/09/firefox-7-is-...

[u48998]

Could someone help identify why Firefox saves and keeps such a ridiculous number of Cache folders in \\Application Data\...\Profiles\... They're all 0, 1, 2...and then 01, 0A, 0B. I mean, what's the point here?

[mbrubeck]

Filesystem performance tends to degrade when you have tens of thousands of files in a single directory, so programs that manage thousands of files usually end up dividing them into many subdirectories. It's not just Firefox - git uses the same strategy, for example.

[yason]

Memory is cheap. High UI latency and cross-browser crashes aren't. Sorry.

[lurker19]

Some people run other apps alongside Firefox and some of those apps also want to provide low UI latency.

[vegai]

"Memory is cheap."

Please leave this field.

[andhow]

Paging isn't cheap; neither are cache misses.

[fedorabbit]

This version inflation thing is getting a bit out of hand...I'm using Firefox 5 right now, I don't feel any difference from Firefox 4.

[stanleydrew]

I'm using Firefox 5 right now, I don't feel any difference from Firefox 4.

That's exactly the point. Which version of Gmail are we on right now? 477? Does that feel different from 476? I don't know. I just get performance improvements and new features as they come out.

[AndyKelley]

The problem with using that metric is that the "feel" of a program is directly related to the UI changes that the version employs. You could change absolutely nothing bug and feature wise, but do a UI redesign and the new version would feel like it was updated a whole bunch.

[Udo]

Clearly, they are pulling the old "major version change marketing stunt" to catch up with a perceived lag in version numbers compared to other browsers. You see, apparently people think IE 9 must be vastly superior to FF 4...

Personally, I think the time for version numbers should probably be over altogether. At this point I feel it's more productive to just tack a date string onto the thing and be done with it. For example, Firefox 2011-July is way more informative than an actual version number.

[AlfaWolph]

We're on "Chrome 13" if that means anything. It shouldn't make a difference as long as major release numbers correspond to major improvements.

[notatoad]

and why do you care?

[grimen]

Well, even with that it won't be comparable to Chrome I'm afraid. Firefox became very heavy suring the years. And no I don't have a lot of add-ons; I have 2 addons in FF and 15 addons in Chrome and yet Chrome processes suck much less memory even if i run it for days without closing. People switching to Chrome is not just PR, really.

[william42]

Well, one thing is that Chrome extensions are much more limited; also, they only even run when you let them.

[Maro]

I'm using Firefox 5.0.1, I just clicked "Check for updates" and it said I'm up-to-date.

Shouldn't 6 come out first? Isn't it too early to talk about 7?

I think this is bad marketing from Mozilla, they're totally confusing people.

[gcp]

6 = current beta, will become release in 1-2 weeks 7 = current alpha (Aurora), will become beta when beta gets released 8 = current nightly, will become Aurora when...you get the point

So basically Firefox 6, 7 and 8 have already "come out" and you can use them if you're willing to run beta or alpha software. (In my experience, Aurora is already very stable, much more so than normal alpha software) The versions advance in a 6 weeks cycle.

I'm guessing the above has been explained about 1000 times when Firefox 5 came out soon after 4, anyway.

[windsurfer]

Firefox 7 isn't even a real release. You'll have to wait for 8. The new versioning system uses the Fibonacci sequence, so that after 8, the next "real" release will be 13, and then 21 etc. This is why you're currently stuck on 5.

[andrewf]

Mozilla isn't marketing anything here. A journalist dug up information from a personal blog and the developer wiki.

[scott_s]

I think Firefox is trying to adopt the Chrome model, which is that version numbers are for the developers only. End users shouldn't need to know which version they're running.

[sp332]

I'm not sure how much you're joking, but Mozilla is releasing 3 versions at a time. Release, Beta, and Aurora. Right now, Release is on version 5, Beta is 6, Aurora is 7. You can get them from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/

[Thrymr9]

You can pick the upcoming releases (beta, currently v6, or Aurora, currently v7) at:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/

[fredleblanc]

Agreed. And in those charts, a view of Firefox 8 puts the memory back up a bit. A quick look makes it feel like two steps forward, one step back.

[wmf]

For better or worse, that's how open source works. You can't really control the message by keeping future versions secret.

[heelhook]

I don't know what everyone is complaining about, whenever I want to open a few more tabs I just purchase a couple more gigs of ram, problem solved, bunch of whiners!

[pestaa]

There are hundreds of better ways to pack & deliver your sarcasm.