Firefox Download Day

Here's a little something I call "Why I use IE instead":

"Most Software Downloads in 24 Hours"? That's a weak world record to aim to break. Why not go for a real record, like the world's largest pancake or the heaviest beard of bees?

Um... Wouldn't porn beat that download record on any given day?

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Original post by Mithrandir Here's a little something I call "Why I use IE instead": *snip*

I agree. I tried to use FF for a while, and I loved the features. But it was too damn slow and ate up horrenously large amounts of memory. But that was quite a while ago. I wonder, have they fixed the speed/memory issues yet?

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Original post by Sc4Freak I agree. I tried to use FF for a while, and I loved the features. But it was too damn slow and ate up horrenously large amounts of memory. But that was quite a while ago. I wonder, have they fixed the speed/memory issues yet?

I just tried a comparison, i loaded the gd.net lounge

iexplorer6 - 20mb
firefox2 - 21mb

so about the same, though it was hard to measure since they both fluctuate a lot and seem to keep their peak memory usage, that is they don't bother to return memory after their done with it

People who get memory problems with Firefox must be doing it wrong, because it's been years since I last experienced anything of the sort. Instead of looking at how much memory it uses, which is largely irrelevant as unused memory is wasted memory, how about looking at actual performance and responsiveness? In my experience, Opera beats Firefox 2 at both, while Fx3 blows both out of the water on both accounts.

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Original post by Kaze so about the same, though it was hard to measure since they both fluctuate a lot and seem to keep their peak memory usage, that is they don't bother to return memory after their done with it

Yep, and why would they bother? :-)
As long as there is still some physical RAM available, freeing buffers doesn't make sense. Having data in buffers greatly increases the chance of having a hit when a resource is accessed again, possibly making a network access unnecessary.
Only when the machine is thrashing on VM, it makes sense to kick buffers, and this is obviously done, because it works nicely. I'm using Firefox every day for about 5 years now (longer than the name "Firefox" exists), and have never had a memory related issue with it.
The recently added "smart" (= stupid) popup menus on forms annoy the hell out of me, but that's about the only bad thing I've encountered in all this time.

There is a common misconception that free RAM is a good thing, some people even make a living of selling "memory optimizer" programs. Those have at best no effect, but usually significantly reduce performance.
RAM is incredibly fast compared to hard disk or network. Therefore, something that is once in RAM should stay there as long as there is no really, really urgent reason to kick it.

Caching resources like files on a disk is the job of the operating system. The OS will have a better overview of all the processes in the system than your application will have. The only problem is that Windows pre Vista was completely horrible at doing it so now everyone has their own in memory cache. That said FF3 is a big step forward and it might convince me to switch away from IE7. Don't really have many issues with IE though, it can't be uninstalled, applications depend on it for various embedded browser controls and so on and so forth. I'd just end up with having two browsers installed that have the exact same functionality.

The only reason I still use IE is because it's the only thing allowed at work! I frequently run in to performance issues with it and a single badly behaving tab can kill the entire browser instance.

I'm all for supporting Mozilla's latest publicity stunt but I don't think I'll recognise it as a record even if the GBR says so.

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I'd just end up with having two browsers installed that have the exact same functionality.

Well, one of them would do CSS/ECMAscript properly...

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Original post by Mithrandir Here's a little something I call "Why I use IE instead":

Oh no, Firefox is using all my precious unused resources to improve itself! Aaahhhhhhh!!! Gimmie my megabytes back! >:|

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Original post by Spodi Quote: Original post by Mithrandir Here's a little something I call "Why I use IE instead": Oh no, Firefox is using all my precious unused resources to improve itself! Aaahhhhhhh!!! Gimmie my megabytes back! >:|

LOL yeah. Besides, the task manager isn't really a good way to even measure that. Even if Firefox frees up some buffers, the OS may elect to keep them assigned to the process.

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Original post by Valderman People who get memory problems with Firefox must be doing it wrong [...]

And how exactly do you "do it wrong" with a web browser? By installing it on your floppy, perhaps? I really have no clue what you're talking about.

I signed up for the world record attempt.

I did a small comparision between FF3 (RC1) and IE7 (prior to testing I emptied all caches, etc. of both browsers)

The RAM usage of each browser with the GDNet forum front page open:
FF3: 46MB
IE7: 36MB

I also tried scrolling up and down the GDNet forum front page repeatedly, and while IE7 managed to keep the CPU usage at around 15%, FF3 occasionally darted all the way to 50%, but mostly kept steady at around 40%.

So, conclusion: FF3 is more resource heavy. I won't change back to IE anytime soon though, the extra resource usage is insignificant to me and far outweighs (or is that underweighs?) the cons of having to use IE.

Firefox is "teh uberz" flexible when it comes to memory. Those who are "doing it wrong" according to Valderman just haven't modified their preferences. I have WinXP and 2 GB of RAM. My computer is very clean, right now with about 25 processes running (including Firefox, my music, uTorrent, and some other stuff thats not always going), and I simply just rarely use more than 1 GB of RAM, let alone 2 GB. So I set Firefox to munch up my memory like a fat kid next to a cake, caching everything it can and even some that it can (its magic like that). In result I can have a bunch of tabs open and be able to have instantaneous loads when moving back/forth through page history. But you can easily set it to decrease the cache, storing much fewer pages and images along with caching less of the history. Theres tons on Google how to do all of this. Most of it is aimed towards using less memory, but you can use those as guides to increasing usage, too.

What I have always wondered is how this affects stuff like Vista's SuperFetch, or whatever that feature is that caches commonly used files. Does FireFox have a way of telling the OS that this memory is low priority and volatile? Or does Vista give way to FireFox? If the latter, then high memory usage is unfortunate, though probably not a big deal still generic OS-level file caching is still hit-and-miss. Either way, FireFox does need to allow the ability to tweak this easily, and I'm surprised they haven't done that already. People should be able to just select a few simple options from "keep it slim" to "eat up as much memory as possible". Hell, tons of programs should add that kind of selection.

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I also tried scrolling up and down the GDNet forum front page repeatedly, and while IE7 managed to keep the CPU usage at around 15%, FF3 occasionally darted all the way to 50%, but mostly kept steady at around 40%.

I'm sorry, but thats a very poor argument. FireFox can be slower at times, this is true. I'm no FireFox fanboy, I just prefer it over IE on faster computers (at least with older FireFox, the load times were horrid on slower comps), and I will admit that just some aspects seem to be slower. But you can't make such a huge statement with such a small test. You can probably conclude, "On my computer, FireFox uses more resources on the GameDev.net front page than IE", but not much more than that. But that sure does make you think "wtf is it doing?" Theres many times FireFox makes me wonder that with some of its seemingly-random high performance times.

Surely the record for downloads is held by Microsoft Update?

My main annoyance with Firefox, and this has persisted through the last few versions although I haven't tried FF3, is that it randomly locks up for up to a minute at a time for no apparent reason. I've tried disabling and replacing various plugins but I still haven't figured out what's causing it. We're not talking about swapping or anything either, usually it just deadlocks while scrolling on a simple text page.
Granted this typically only happens when I've been running the same instance for a week or two and I've usually got at least two dozen tabs open, but it's annoying nevertheless.

Also has anyone else noticed that the download manager scales very poorly with large numbers of files? Trying to download a few hundred links is nearly impossible without using the cleanup button to wipe the list every once in a while, making the manager itself virtually useless. But this is such an obvious issue that it's got to be caused by some plugin.

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Original post by superpig Surely the record for downloads is held by Microsoft Update?

Surely that record is the most downloaded bug fixes in a day? :)
Anyway the record will be a new one so there are no targets set.

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/28/moz_download_day/ Mozilla aims to make Firefox 3 a record breaker. It wants the release of the next version of its flagship open source browser to be accompanied by a record for the most software downloads in a single 24-hour period 1. ... 1 Mozilla is trying for a record in a new category, according to a representative of the firm. That means it doesn't have an existing mark to better. The open source browser outfit aims to secure over 1.6m downloads over 24 hours.

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Original post by Spodi You can probably conclude, "On my computer, FireFox uses more resources on the GameDev.net front page than IE", but not much more than that.

I'm eating my hat. I did some more testing on some other sites:



The GDNet forum front page difference between FF3 and IE7 still holds though. Strange.

[Edited by - polymorphed on May 30, 2008 8:47:12 AM]