Firefox 13 to be 2.5x Better Than Chrome in Memory Usage

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belardo

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Screw firefox and mozilla. Mine is still 4.0 and used as a test. This is such BS... changing a font doesn't make a whole version number.

Opera spent 15 years to get to version 11... ff goes from 4->13 in a year?

In a two years... "Man, can't wait till firefox 69 comes out!"
 

RogueKitsune

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[citation][nom]thefive0[/nom]In the days of having 4 and 8GB of RAM, is memory usage really that important?[/citation]

^my thoughts exactly^

My desktop has 12GB of RAM and my laptop has 4GB of RAM, so as long as there is not a memory leak I really don't care that much about memory usage.
 

A Bad Day

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[citation][nom]RogueKitsune[/nom]^my thoughts exactly^My desktop has 12GB of RAM and my laptop has 4GB of RAM, so as long as there is not a memory leak I really don't care that much about memory usage.[/citation]

What about folks with 2GB or less ram because they can't upgrade the RAM anymore?
 

danwat1234

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But even with Firefox 14, the rendering engine will only be able to take advantage of 1 CPU core, no matter how many CPUs you have or how many tabs you are loading. Google Chrome on the other hand, will use 1 CPU core per tab and some smartphone browsers can render a tab with multiple cores.
Time to catch up
 

11796pcs

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I hate these new rediculous update cycles. I'm still running Firefox 3.6 on my Ubuntu machine. And 3.6 isn't really that old (two years maybe). Firefox and Chrome, you're not fooling anyone, you're just annoying us. I guess I'll stick with Opera.
 

alextheblue

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[citation][nom]jrharbort[/nom]Add-ons tend to update on their own as necessary, and the browser update process will notify you if an extension you're using is not compatible with the newer revision. Then it'll ask to check for a newer version of the add-on, or if you want to disable it until a newer revision becomes available.[/citation]
This is why I hate silent updates. I want it to ask/inform. That way I can make sure add-ons/extensions are compatible BEFORE I update the browser itself. If I have to wait a bit for them to catch up to the latest browser version, that's fine by me. But if the browser silently keeps itself up to date, they can break stuff you use at random and that can get annoying.

Imagine if Minecraft went to silent/mandatory updates again. Oh look all your mods are broken again! Plus you can't connect to your fav server anyway because that isn't updated, and if it does get updated it'll break their mods too!
 

thegreatms

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[citation][nom]rangas[/nom]firefox i will never give you up[/citation]
[citation][nom]830hobbes[/nom]never gonna let you down![/citation]
Never gonna run around and desert you
 

agnickolov

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[citation][nom]jrharbort[/nom]I say something is wrong with your own system then, because I don't have any of these issues on a Core 2 Duo P8800 notebook with 3.25GB usable memory.[/citation]
My own experience is that Firefox gets rather slow when its memory consumption footprint reaches 800MB to 1GB, at least in the usage scenarios I have at work. These involve a lot of data being streamed into single pages, most of it plain HTML or even plain text. It usually takes about 1-2 weeks to get into such a nearly crawl state. The machine has 8GB RAM and it's not heavily utilized, so RAM is not the problem. I suspect it has to do with lots of internal tables and lots of garbage left inside them (the memory leaks everybody talks about). The CPU is quad core, albeit somewhat ancient (Core 2 Quad Q9550).
 

tomfreak

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[citation][nom]otacon72[/nom]...not really. FF has always been a memory hog and it slows down dramatically after time. The same 5 tabs open in FF that takes up 400MB of RAM takes 213MB in IE9. I'm not even including the plug-in container...tack on another 40MB for that. FF has been garbage after v4. It still crashes with Flash all the time.[/citation]Google chrome also crash sometimes for fail read their cache. I care less about it taking my memery as long it stays below 2Gb. I would prefer all these browser less likely to crash instead of being "use" less resources.
 

gigabyter64

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I use program called "firemin" to manage firefox memory issue, doesn't seem to use more than 15-30mb no matter how many tabs are running.
 

virtualban

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I love the Opera interface and how I can fix it to my liking, without taking away my "http://" (hear that chrome?), and without changing irreversibly the way tabs and menus are organized (hear that firefox?). Opera's newer versions will eventually run the scripts like the other browsers, for example the scripts in 9gag.com , just like past new versions finally ran the feedback page of Tom's Hardware the way it was supposed to be ran.
Chrome is good, no doubt about it. Especially since I can put chrome on parents' and grandparents' computers and then forget about it. What mozilla needs to understand is that we went firefox for the features that include look and feel, tabs and menu being such, and in this day and age, if we really wanted simplified chrome-like interface, we would go chrome. It's not like competition is lacking like in the netscape days. Simple is not always better. And losing market share like this will translate in later losing the edge in plugins as well.

A (still) firefox user.
 

alidan

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[citation][nom]therabiddeer[/nom]Question for those that update regularly:Do you have to keep updating and setting up your add-ons with each update of firefox?[/citation]

no, i pick one and stay with it till something major is released, i like the incremental releases because if a release of a .01 will break extension functionality (yes, even if you force some, when firefox updates it some wont work), than it may as well be a full number... and faster releases mean they get things out faster, and bug check a smaller amount each time, so its not like another ff4 where its late by what, was it 6 months late?

[citation][nom]mrpijey[/nom]You mean use 2.5x more memory than Chrome? Firefox is slow, bloated and buggy, and it seems their version inflation has been put in the drivers seat rather than fixing all the bloat and bugs. I love the plugins in Firefox and it took a lot of energy and restraint to move away from it, but now I am free from its bloat and I only test it when there's a new major version out. So far it's been far from impressive...Firefox runs as a dead dog today if you have a few decent plugins and tabs open at all times. And this on a high end i7 with 24GB RAM... I am not saying Chrome (which I use) is the perfect browser - far from it, but if I had to choose between the black plague and the ebola I have to choose the one that kills me with the least amount of pain.[/citation]

if i had 24gb of ram chrome would be my go to as well, but as it stands, i have 10 times the tabs open in firefox and it still uses less than chrome (waterfox variant, 10, 64bit, it uses more ram than normal ff by almost 1gb, but its still less than half of a far less weighed down chrome)

i mean lets look at it from a rational point of view... if i could save the whole web page as a png, and the size of that png is smaller than what chrome is useing to show the web page... something is screwed up... but chrome... if you have the ram... preforms far better multimedia than ff ever has.

[citation][nom]razor512[/nom]herd that mozilla is planning to add a feature where each additional tab run in it's own process so that when a tab is closed 100% of it's memory allocation can be flushed.We should be seeing it in firefox 3587763498276456590678487435897 coming out later this year.Later they plan to finally introduce multithreading which will mean 3-4 times the performance on a quad core CPU(version 5487875485458466789456725476547636495104501435-056145613405134591345138045387045)[/citation]

each tab being its own process is what makes chrome hog so much damn memory... that is a feature that would see me stop using ff completely.

[citation][nom]therabiddeer[/nom]But do you have to keep tweaking the settings with each update? I remember going from 3 to 4 I lost a ton of extensions for a long time, and the ones that I kept I had to set up all over again. It was a huge hassle.[/citation]

no, i have went from 3.5 to 5.0 to nightly 8.0 to standard 8.0 to standard 9.0 and waterfox 64bit...

its general consensus that if a tab isn't working and isn't being updated, that its abandoned, so find a variant.

i moved to ff 8 a long time ago... so i cant tell you what setting i had to mess with... because i has some extentions that were dropped in version 3.5 and screwed up the browser if i forced extentions to run. i dont remember ever needing to reset tab mix plus from 3.5 through to waterfox... so i think something screwed up on your end when you made that switch.

[citation][nom]lordstormdragon[/nom]To all users complaining about Firefox's memory usage: install MemoryFox, already. It's a free add-on. It comes up second if you Google-search "memory firefox". It will take care of your memory problems, just as it has for the past few years to those who know how to use Google or any search engine."Oh, but I shouldn't NEED an add-on to handle my memory issues!" Well, yes you should. Add-ons are created so people will stop whining and get back to work. So do just that, people![/citation]

it works, i can testify to that, i used it on my full system prior to getting 8gb of ram... it made chrome far more useable than it is, but at the cost of taking away and amount of speed you have with the programs... if you have at most 20 tabs at any given time open... its a great addon, but if you use more, browser speed at minimum comes to a hault.

[citation][nom]agnickolov[/nom]My own experience is that Firefox gets rather slow when its memory consumption footprint reaches 800MB to 1GB, at least in the usage scenarios I have at work. These involve a lot of data being streamed into single pages, most of it plain HTML or even plain text. It usually takes about 1-2 weeks to get into such a nearly crawl state. The machine has 8GB RAM and it's not heavily utilized, so RAM is not the problem. I suspect it has to do with lots of internal tables and lots of garbage left inside them (the memory leaks everybody talks about). The CPU is quad core, albeit somewhat ancient (Core 2 Quad Q9550).[/citation]

firefox 32bit crawl at about 725mb... starts to patriotically lock up at 1.25gb, and crashes to the point you have to manually close it at 1.5gb

when i went to waterfox, i noticed an immediate jump in ram useage from an average 500mb, to over 1gb... but right now im sitting with over 500 tabs, and its sitting at 1.73gb of use...

chrome is sitting at 27 tabs exactly, and is using about 2.6gb viable, but if i close it ill get between 3 and 4gb back.

[citation][nom]otacon72[/nom]...not really. FF has always been a memory hog and it slows down dramatically after time. The same 5 tabs open in FF that takes up 400MB of RAM takes 213MB in IE9. I'm not even including the plug-in container...tack on another 40MB for that. FF has been garbage after v4. It still crashes with Flash all the time.[/citation]

yea flash sucks in fire fox... if you are only going to open 2 or 3 pages... use something else instead, if you are going to open alot of pages, thats where ff shines.

 

fishyfish

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[citation][nom]RogueKitsune[/nom]^my thoughts exactly^My desktop has 12GB of RAM and my laptop has 4GB of RAM, so as long as there is not a memory leak I really don't care that much about memory usage.[/citation]

Poor excuse for lazy developers.
 

fishyfish

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I used to be a devoted Firefox user, had it since version 2 IIRC on all PCs for years, but eventually switched to Chrome and never looked back. Few reasons:

- Firefox is slower. No matter if it's my wife's 5-yr old laptop or my i5 with 8GB RAM and SSD drive - it opens slower than Chrome

- FF updates often break addons. There are tons of incompatible ones and quite often all settings are lost. I never had it with Crome.

- Chrome will let me log in to my google account and sync everything between computers. I use new PC? No problem, Chrome will pull all bookmarks, history and most important - all add-ins with their configuration in seconds. I know this can be done in FF, but I can't be bothered registering another account and using 3rd party tools when I already have gmail and Chrome has this built-in.

- Chrome search suggestions work better. When you type something in address bar, top search result appears under the cursor, so you just press ENTER. In FF you have to go DOWN and ENTER. Small thing but annoying.

- Chrome has nice 'most visited' screen with pages preview built-in, FF needs another add-in to do it.

- Chrome is just faster. That's the fact.



As I said - I used to love FF and just about a year ago chrome still had some issues with forms, javascript buttons etc. not appearing properly, but now it is fantastic, polished browser that beats FF in almost every aspect. It will take Mozilla more than bit of memory savings to get me back.
 

fishyfish

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Oh, one more thing with FF - Private browsing. Chrome will just open another private window so I can use it next to currently opened pages. Firefox will close everything and then open private window. No, thank you.

 

gavjof

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I use both FF 10 and Chrome 17 at work. Both FF and Chrome are open all day for different tasks/sites.

My Firefox has 45 tabs open across 8 tab groups while Chrome simply has 8 tabs open. I generally find firefox uses less memory than Chrome (probably thanks to the groups).

Firefox is currently using 507MB while Chrome is using a combined total of 412MB. I also have WAY more addons installed and running on FF.
 

cookoy

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A 25% drop in memory usage is quite good but a 2.5x better improvement is really huge. So i'll just give the source the benefit of the doubt.
 
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