Mozilla Firefox 29.0.1

[Forsaken]

Maximus boards... That's a Z67 chipset, isn't it?

Wow, really late reply.

The Maximus IV is z67; I have a Z87 which is the Hero VI.

As far as using Firefox... I'm pretty much done at this point. It still has the memory issues, and handles Flash worse than Chrome or Opera. While there are some things to like about it, performance issues and the fact that I would have to completely change browsing habits really do not make it worth using.

Rather go without native bookmarks than continue using Firefox at this point.

EDIT: 40 tabs open (10 of which are flash heavy) and Opera takes 3.5GB. Firefox 3GB for Flash alone, and 2.5GB for Firefox itself, with all but 4 add-ons disabled (Opera has about 20 extensions, some of which are for Chrome).

 

[OSS 117]

That's because they handle extensions and plugins differently. Firefox will become like Opera/Chrome very soon and then everyone can share the misery of Chrome. I rarely get more than 1.5-2 GB of use on Firefox. A bog standard install of Firefox doesn't have memory issues. The issues is how certain extensions work, namely ad blocking ones. Which continue to inject style sheets in every page. It's an issue with Chrome, Firefox and whatever Safari runs on these days.

 

[Forsaken]

That's because they handle extensions and plugins differently. Firefox will become like Opera/Chrome very soon and then everyone can share the misery of Chrome. I rarely get more than 1.5-2 GB of use on Firefox. A bog standard install of Firefox doesn't have memory issues. The issues is how certain extensions work, namely ad blocking ones. Which continue to inject style sheets in every page. It's an issue with Chrome, Firefox and whatever Safari runs on these days.

I ran 4 add-ons, only one of which (Xmarks) could have any impact on performance. On Opera I was running 27 extensions, some of which take 100-150mb by themselves.

I ran both browsers over night for around 12 hours with the exact same tabs open (using TabCloud). Opera was using default settings (no performance tweaks or developer options) so they were as on equal a footing as they could possibly have.

Honestly... Once Firefox starts using ~2.5GB of ram or more, it becomes sluggish and often crashes for me. When I go through several hundred tabs a day (40-50 per session of me weeding through RSS feeds alone) you can see how that can become frustrating. Chrome handles Flash much better as well, and Opera does so even better due to a recent update (at least in my experience).

Now if only they'd stop making features like Tab Peek (which no one really wanted, and is more annoying than useful) and introduce a decent bookmark solution for those of us who are bookmarking fiends.

 

[RickM]

I'm TL;DR'ing this thread - quick question:

Is it still slow/bloated as hell and not fully supporting CSS3, or did they finally fix it?

 

[RickM]

then everyone can share the misery of Chrome.

What misery would that be? Genuine issue or Google hate?

 

[Forsaken]

I'm TL;DR'ing this thread - quick question:

Is it still slow/bloated as hell and not fully supporting CSS3, or did they finally fix it?

It's quick if you don't use any add-ons (especially adblock), don't have a lot of tabs, and don't use Flash. Otherwise I can get the browser to freeze in a hour or so of heavy usage.

What misery would that be? Genuine issue or Google hate?

Chrome does some weird things, but honestly... The way they handle memory leads to a better browser than what Firefox is doing. I can get upwards to ~6-8GB of memory usage with Chrome/Opera and not have to worry about the browser wanting to freeze or crash constantly.

 

[Amaury]

Chrome does some weird things, but honestly... The way they handle memory leads to a better browser than what Firefox is doing. I can get upwards to ~6-8GB of memory usage with Chrome/Opera and not have to worry about the browser wanting to freeze or crash constantly.

You must do a lot of things at once and have a lot of tabs open, because I don't have any memory issues with Mozilla Firefox:

 

[Forsaken]

You must do a lot of things at once and have a lot of tabs open, because I don't have any memory issues with Mozilla Firefox:

View attachment 77157

I explained my average usage above.

 

[OSS 117]

Likewise I usually have up to 50 tabs open in Firefox ranging from simple sites, to video feeds to heavily scripted sites. If you're experiencing memory or general performance issues, try cleaning of your SQLITE file or better yet, start afresh with a new profile and just import your bookmarks and history. This can be done with FEBE.

Chrome still slows down even if you have gigs upon gigs of RAM. It may use 4-5 GB but it does slow down considerably. Closing Chrome and starting it back up fixes that issue.

 

[Amaury]

Likewise I usually have up to 50 tabs open in Firefox ranging from simple sites, to video feeds to heavily scripted sites. If you're experiencing memory or general performance issues, try cleaning of your SQLITE file or better yet, start afresh with a new profile and just import your bookmarks and history. This can be done with FEBE.

Chrome still slows down even if you have gigs upon gigs of RAM. It may use 4-5 GB but it does slow down considerably. Closing Chrome and starting it back up fixes that issue.

One of the reasons I don't like Google Chrome is that if you leave it idle for a while, it takes a minute or two for the tabs to become active again for some reason.

 

[OSS 117]

Do you happen to use Windows?

 

[Amaury]

Do you happen to use Windows?

Yes.

 

[OSS 117]

What are your indexing settings set for?

 

[Amaury]

What are your indexing settings set for?

Not sure where to find that.

 

[RickM]

Chrome still slows down even if you have gigs upon gigs of RAM. It may use 4-5 GB but it does slow down considerably. Closing Chrome and starting it back up fixes that issue.

This must be specific to the Windows version I think. I've used chrome for years on my Mac, and will regularly have 100+ tabs spread across a handful of windows and haven't ever had it cause problems with massive RAM usage. I never really shut it down, nor do I shut my mac down. My uptime right now is at about 2 months, and I've got no memory issues.

 

[Forsaken]

Likewise I usually have up to 50 tabs open in Firefox ranging from simple sites, to video feeds to heavily scripted sites. If you're experiencing memory or general performance issues, try cleaning of your SQLITE file or better yet, start afresh with a new profile and just import your bookmarks and history. This can be done with FEBE.

Chrome still slows down even if you have gigs upon gigs of RAM. It may use 4-5 GB but it does slow down considerably. Closing Chrome and starting it back up fixes that issue.

Advice like this makes me cringe... Looking at it objectively, can you honestly say you would use a program where such advice is common place, especially when that program isn't labeled with alpha, beta or in a similar state of development? Would you be able to make the same suggestions to someone in your family who is likely not tech savvy?

Every browser is going to have performance issues when using a lot of RAM, however I find Firefox to suffer from crippled performance much sooner than Chrome with similar usage. And it isn't like Firefox doesn't admit they have issues with performance, they just like to try to pass off the blame. If theres an issue with add-ons consuming memory, work on rework the add-on system or incorporate some of the suggestions the add-on makers have suggested. If there is an issue with how many tabs are open, and with some tabs not getting entirely cleared from memory (yes, this is still a problem) then rework how you deal with tabs.

Also you do not even need to fully close Chrome. More often than not, I just open up the Chrome Task manager find what is consuming a ton of memory and close that and the browser performs just fine.

 

[RickM]

Also you do not even need to fully close Chrome. More often than not, I just open up the Chrome Task manager find what is consuming a ton of memory and close that and the browser performs just fine.

I was going to say, Chrome's got it's own sandboxed memory management. Closing tabs frees up memory. Heck it's got it's own built in task manager where you can see what's using the most resources.

I still dont get why it's an issue for @OSS 117 though :/ If someones hitting memory issues with their browser, upgrade your machine. I'm on a rMBP 2012 model with 8GB ram and as I mentioned above, I regularly have hundreds of chrome tabs open at the same time as things like xcode, photoshop, vmware, etc. I never have any issues and I never, ever close chrome. Seems like either crappy specced machine, or some sort of external factor causing issues (i.e crap memory management in Firefox or some sort of addon/extension causing issues).

I upgrade my machine every couple of years to ensure I dont have these issues. My next one will have 16GB or 32GB ram, theres no reason not to do so these days as RAM's so cheap. If someones trying to run all the above on a 4GB ram little Windows machine then they can expect all sorts of problems.

 

[Forsaken]

I was going to say, Chrome's got it's own sandboxed memory management. Closing tabs frees up memory. Heck it's got it's own built in task manager where you can see what's using the most resources.

I still dont get why it's an issue for @OSS 117 though :/ If someones hitting memory issues with their browser, upgrade your machine. I'm on a rMBP 2012 model with 8GB ram and as I mentioned above, I regularly have hundreds of chrome tabs open at the same time as things like xcode, photoshop, vmware, etc. I never have any issues and I never, ever close chrome. Seems like either crappy specced machine, or some sort of external factor causing issues (i.e crap memory management in Firefox or some sort of addon/extension causing issues).

I upgrade my machine every couple of years to ensure I dont have these issues. My next one will have 16GB or 32GB ram, theres no reason not to do so these days as RAM's so cheap. If someones trying to run all the above on a 4GB ram little Windows machine then they can expect all sorts of problems.

I think he was just stating there is a similar issue with Chrome, not that he had one himself.

The minimum RAM anyone should be using is 8GB, and most people won't ever need more than that.

 

[Amaury]

I think he was just stating there is a similar issue with Chrome, not that he had one himself.

The minimum RAM anyone should be using is 8GB, and most people won't ever need more than that.

Here I am with only 2.00 GB, with 1.75 GB being usable.

 

[OSS 117]

Correct, Forsaken. The way Chrome handles extensions, pages and plugins allows it to use large amounts of memory. Must be a Windows Chrome issue as I've always built my desktops with performance in mind, no matter the cost. Though I've spotted a nice sale price for a 64 gb kit. Doubling down on RAM before the prices surge again.