Mozilla software engineer Stuart Parmenter explains the new and improved inner workings of the Firefox 3 memory manager and what was involved in the quest of decreasing the browser's memory load. Not simply all about fixing memory leaks, it involved solving memory fragmentation issues as well, as Windows and most other operating system allocates memory in blocks and may not "see" small enough fragments of memory as usable in practice.
View: Firefox 3 Memory Usage
View: Firefox 3 Memory Usage
Or is this saying that they are still working on it and it's still nearly as bad as FF2??
Or is this saying that they are still working on it and it's still nearly as bad as FF2??
It's saying that they have a new technology in place. New technologies typically are introduced because they will build a good basis for the long term. Hopefully the original problems that were found (through bug reports) will be corrected by Firefox 3 and the added memory manager will go above and beyond going to help with those problems. Surely not every problem will be found by the release of Firefox 3, but this is the plan for what will be Firefox 3.
With OSS there's no marketing PR saying "We are going to release a product that does this", instead there is only the reality of what software development will produce. If you feel that strongly about the problem, you can lend a hand (you don't have to be a programmer, just search their bug report page for a problem and join the discussion, or if you're having a new problem, report that and make people aware), or sit back and hope for the best. If you have a better plan than what they came up with, then join Mozilla, or fork (that means take the source code as of now and start your own custom build) the project and do it better with your organization or even by yourself if you think you can do it.
Yes, it is!!
Isn't it?
They've also implemented methods to catch out memory leaks from extensions and new code, so from this point onwards, Firefox's performance should only improve.
I've been using FF3B4 all day, with multiple tabs open and right now it's using about 110Mb. I've yet to see it go much higher than that.
EDIT: I just did some testing. Obviously these aren't conclusive, but they're good enough for me.
With 4 or 5 tabs open and approximately 6 hours of uptime, memory usage was hovering around 110Mb.
I opened up a whole bunch of new tabs (blank ones). I counted about 20. Memory usage went up by about 10kb. When I close all of the blank tabs, memory usage actually dropped by about 2Mb, less than before I opened the blank tabs (I'm guessing this was due to Firefox removing uncompressed images from memory, as detailed in the above article).
Next, I opened up my homepage in about 15 different tabs. This is a google homepage with quite a few elements on it, although not many images. Memory usage was now at around 111Mb (an increase of approximately 3Mb).
Closing them, memory usage quickly dropped once again to around the 110Mb mark.
For my final test, I opened my bookmarks, right clicked one of the folders and selected "open All in Tabs". Firefox gave me a warning that I was about to open 18 tabs (Note: All of these sites had varying amounts of scripts, images, etc. on them). I clicked ok.
All of the tabs loaded very quickly, less than a couple of seconds (and by loaded, I mean the pages had completely loaded, with all elements displayed) and memory peaked at about 118Mb.
I started closing the tabs and before I'd even closed half of them, memory usage had already dropped to 111Mb. By the time I closed them all, memory usage was down to 108Mb and has stayed there as I typed this.
I should also point out that I'm using around 10 extensions as well.
Improvements? Definitely.
Last edited by Kushan on 12 Mar 2008 - 16:15
opend 34 tabs, cpu usage 14%(1 tab played online lecture)
all in all
119 mb
firefox 3 beta 4 with 4 tabs htis aorund 30mb for me...
I have IE8 open with 5 tabs right now, and I'm using 155mb.
And 30mb sounds waaaay too low for FF with ANY tabs open. Maybe if it was bare-bones (no add-ons).
It DOES use more memory than what IE7 did. But this is a developer beta with lots of stuff going on that's not final. Beta 2 and up will be a better sign of things as far as IE8 goes.
I have IE8 open with 5 tabs right now, and I'm using 155mb.
And 30mb sounds waaaay too low for FF with ANY tabs open. Maybe if it was bare-bones (no add-ons).
My Firefox uses 76Mb (6 tabs) with IE Tab, Gmail Manager and NoScript. I've personally found IE and Opera to be higher (I've had Opera go as high as 200Mb with 10 tabs). It really depends on the exact setup, IMO.
I have IE8 open with 5 tabs right now, and I'm using 155mb.
And 30mb sounds waaaay too low for FF with ANY tabs open. Maybe if it was bare-bones (no add-ons).
Firefox3b4 with just this page open is at 31MB for me. Only add-on I'm using is adblock+
I would say fairly better than FF2, but way out there in terms of IE.
In conclusion, Firefox 3 will be the version were the world converts.
Actually, it's much quicker than Opera now. Plus,of course, combined with all the other pluses of Firefox, it's much better in every way.
There are a few I like to use, like Tab-Mix Plus for example, but I can't leave the browser active for more than a day before pages start rendering really bad, video stops working and even links don't open.
Without the extra add-ons Firefox isn't half bad at all. Firefox 3 is definitely an improvement over 2 (from Beta 4 onward).
However, at least Firefox 3 beta 4 seem to work at fixing whatever can be fixed even in this area by better trying to release what can be released also as for extensions. But I guess it still can't fix sloppy programming so I guess this problem will most likely remain to some extent.
I have a lot of addons and they do eat memory more then a standard fx install.
The only thing I'm missing is Foxmarks. I hope they make a FF3-compatible version of it soon.
FF3B4 with 15 tabs open was roughly 70mb on Vista, with the only extension used being adblock plus. It started out with only 1 tab (this page) at around 45mb. Since I closed everything they have steadily been dropping and is sitting at around 60mb as I type.
Off Topic: I wish more sites used Silverlight, as it seems better than Flash.
but it's a pretty noticeable improvement when is all said and done
Last edited by ThaCrip on 13 Mar 2008 - 03:55
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuartp/2328802961/sizes/o/
Though i did try it for a bit, seemed abit better than the current release version.
(safari crashes before it can complete the test)
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