Firefox 4: still a memory hog

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dclegg

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#452359 27-Mar-2011 12:15

I installed FF4 for Mac on Thursday. It crashed 3 times on Thursday, but Friday was relatively "stable", with FF only winking out of existence once that day. I'm gonna give it a little bit longer, but if this instability keeps up I'll probably be switching back to Safari or giving Chrome another bash (rendering irregularities on some sites initially put me off).

nakedmolerat

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#452378 27-Mar-2011 13:23

simon14: Chrome 19,000k
IE9 33,000k
Firefox4 60,000k

more details? how many tabs? screenshot? i open 35 tabs earlier this morning with at least 5 sites that use flash heavily. firefox still uses less than 600MB for me but chrome reaching 1GB

simon14

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#452384 27-Mar-2011 13:35

nakedmolerat:
simon14: Chrome 19,000k
IE9 33,000k
Firefox4 60,000k

more details? how many tabs? screenshot? i open 35 tabs earlier this morning with at least 5 sites that use flash heavily. firefox still uses less than 600MB for me but chrome reaching 1GB

That was a test with all browsers open with only 1 tab on the geekzone homepage.

8d52797c436

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#452466 27-Mar-2011 17:19

freitasm:
richms: IMO, it is still inexcusable the amount it takes, at least its not like some other browsers that crap all over your computer with many many processes, seemingly one or 2 per tab (cough IE cough)

And Chrome. On the other hand, if a tab crashes, it won't take down the whole browser.

That is the theory at least, although in practice it doesnt always work that way.

There is a spin-off project of FF that is working towards making FF use the same architecture (seperate process per tab) yet it is a huge change, and while it has been around for a while it is going to take a long time to make these changes and then integrate them back in to the main FF trunk.

richms

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#452468 27-Mar-2011 17:22

Well I am happy enough with flash being moved to another process since thats the usual one that takes incredible amounts of ram. Just killed plugin-container because it was hitting 1.4 gigs ram used. All I had done in that browser was watch a ustream and the associated chat.

Richard rich.ms

8d52797c436

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#452473 27-Mar-2011 17:26

richms: Well I am happy enough with flash being moved to another process since thats the usual one that takes incredible amounts of ram. Just killed plugin-container because it was hitting 1.4 gigs ram used. All I had done in that browser was watch a ustream and the associated chat.

Generally I find the biggest issue I have with FF4 is the flash player always causing errors. I have FF4 and Chrome installed at home and work, and most of the time I will watch videos in Chrome just because it seems more stable.

If it wasnt for the new panorama and group tab stuff you can do in FF4, I would probably have given up on it by now. But now that I'm used to having a different tab group for each project I'm working on plus another one for my personal stuff, I couldnt imagine not having things setup like that in a browser.

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richms

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#452475 27-Mar-2011 17:30

8d52797c436:

If it wasnt for the new panorama and group tab stuff you can do in FF4, I would probably have given up on it by now. But now that I'm used to having a different tab group for each project I'm working on plus another one for my personal stuff, I couldnt imagine not having things setup like that in a browser.

I have seperate instances of firefox to handle that, with their own bookmarks synced via xmarks. Means that crap like that facebook snooping doesnt worry me as much as the profile I use facebook in doesnt see much other use.

Also sorts out that mess that is google accounts since the multiple login thing has never worked properly IME

Richard rich.ms

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#452613 28-Mar-2011 00:28

I never found Firefox to be a memory hog.. In fact I fond it to be the lightest on my system... But the thing that im not sure about with fx 4 is that things seem to take longer to load.. They say that its the fastest version of fx yet... but I seem to have to wait that little bit longer for webpages and videos to load... Is it just me? or everyone?

kyhwana2

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#452635 28-Mar-2011 09:21

Hmm, have you tried disabling all your addons or running FF in safe-mode on the same page?

simon14

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#452651 28-Mar-2011 09:49

kyhwana2: Hmm, have you tried disabling all your addons or running FF in safe-mode on the same page?

My only addon was Firefox Sync which Chrome has built in anyway.

Ragnor

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#452842 28-Mar-2011 17:41

simon14:
kyhwana2: Hmm, have you tried disabling all your addons or running FF in safe-mode on the same page?

My only addon was Firefox Sync which Chrome has built in anyway.

Firefox 4 has inbuilt sync, perhaps this addon is causing a conflict/problem?

Obviously huge memory usage is indicative of a problem but comparing "normal" memory usage is meaningless....

You want your browser to cache things in memory instead of reading them from disk/internet or redoing processing/parsing. Higher memory usage is often better for performance!

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