• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

The first Firefox update I've really disliked.

29?!?! I just checked and I'm running 17. Am I missing anything by just standing pat. Some of the changes mentioned here don't seem attractive.
 
Some, and I say some, improvements in the latest 29.0.1 update. At least the tabs are now readable. :cool:
 
Would be nice if Mozilla, instead of working on more and more bling-bling, would start working on the memory management. Mozilla has become a memory hog. I have a bout 8 to 10 browser windows open all the time, each having between one and 10 tabs. After some time, FF is clogging up about 10 GBytes of RAM. Closing and re-opening tabs and windows does not help, only closing FF completely does. Sometimes.

What's so hard about freeing the resources used when a tab/window is closed or a page reloaded? And what's so hard about keeping track of the alloc'd memory, so it won't have orphan memory segments clogged up when it is completely closed?

Greetings,

Chris
 
Christian Klippel said:
Would be nice if Mozilla, instead of working on more and more bling-bling, would start working on the memory management. Mozilla has become a memory hog. I have a bout 8 to 10 browser windows open all the time, each having between one and 10 tabs. After some time, FF is clogging up about 10 GBytes of RAM. Closing and re-opening tabs and windows does not help, only closing FF completely does. Sometimes.

What's so hard about freeing the resources used when a tab/window is closed or a page reloaded? And what's so hard about keeping track of the alloc'd memory, so it won't have orphan memory segments clogged up when it is completely closed?

Greetings,

Chris
Click to expand...


Wow! :jaw-dropp

:p
 
Why do you folks have so many windows and tabs? I close Firefox when not in use. When in use, I might have about 10 tabs and then I start closing them because who can keep track?

~~ Paul
 
I compartmentalise a little. So, for example, if I'm taking an online course in something then I'll have all the tabs related to that (even if it's just the one) open in one browser, and forums, games, and other leisure stuff open in another.

As for why so many tabs, it depends on exactly what I'm looking for. At the moment, I've got, from left to right, 6 subforums from this message board, 3 subforums from another message board, 3 subforums from another message board, a game I play, my Flickr account, 2 YouTube channels whose content I'm working my way through, a YouTube video that's part of a series I'm working my way through, this thread, 2 other threads from JREF that I'm going to be reading and maybe replying to next, then 5 threads from another forum I'm going to be reading and maybe replying to next. I'll close the threads when I'm done, but not the rest. And if, for example, I want to check if anything interesting has happened on this board I take advantage of one of the add-ons I've got to highlight all the subforum tabs I've got and reload them all simultaneously. I'll then look through them one at a time and drag upwards any links from them which either look interesting or which I have already been following (provided I've not got bored of it in the meantime), which will open that thread in a background tab. Or if the mood takes me to carry on watching one of the things I've been watching on YouTube it's far quicker to just click on the relevant tab and go from there than to either search through bookmarks or search YouTube for whichever video or channel it is. It's easy to keep track of them as different websites have different little logos by them and, depending on how many tabs are open, you can see either the whole heading or the first few letters of the heading of the page.

You can also go off down interesting tangents. So say I'm looking something up on Wikipedia. Say I want to find out about Charlie Chaplin. So I look up Charlie Chaplin. The Wikipedia page may mention Clara Bow. I might wonder who she is and so I'll look her up in a new tab. One of the citations on her page might be an article entitled "The Flappers: Who, What, Where, and Why?" which might pique my interest, so I'll open that in a new tab. That article might mention the legality of cocaine in the US during the 20s, which might make me open a new tab and search StartPage for the history of drug laws in the US. That might turn up 4 or 5 articles or documents which seem interesting, so I'll open them all up in different tabs. And so on.

One of the great things about the internet is that so much information is available at your fingertips and any time you have an odd thought you can see if you can follow it up and educate yourself. You can end up very far away from where you originally started. But that doesn't mean that you've lost interest in where you originally started. Just because I'm now reading about the soft drink Coke being named after cocaine (and checking Straight Dope in yet another tab to see if it's a myth or not) doesn't mean that I'm no longer interested in Charlie Chaplin. I've gone off down a digressionary tunnel, but having the start of that tunnel still open is useful for if/when I want to backtrack.

FWIW, the spellchecker didn't recognise "digressionary", so I opened up a new tab for that and looked it up in the dictionary, just to check that it's not an odd spelling. Lots of tabs are great, and I dislike the push towards making browsing on a desktop more like browsing on a tablet or phone where you're restricted to one window/tab.

You close Firefox when it's not in use? Firefox not in use? I don't understand what you mean.
 
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Oh, I usually reply to posts in a separate tab, too. That way it's trivial to click between the two and ensure that every quote I'm replying to is in context, as the forum software edits quotes out. If the conversation is particularly involved I may spread several posts out over several tabs, in order to keep everything that the poster(s) I'm replying to in its proper context without having to spend all my time scrolling backwards and forwards trying to find the same 3 or 4 posts.
 
I'll get a lot of tabs open when I'm wiki-walking, myself, but if there's something topical enough to warrant its own window I'll start up a new tab group and keep up with it there.

I don't know for sure, but I don't think the tabs in those groups have all the overhead of active windows, and on start-up they don't all get loaded.
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
Why do you folks have so many windows and tabs? I close Firefox when not in use. When in use, I might have about 10 tabs and then I start closing them because who can keep track?

~~ Paul
Click to expand...

Lots of tabs for searching datasheets and part specs, tabs for EE related sources that i need during work, tabs for distributor sites to check if they have a part i'm interrested in (no sense in designing-in a part that looks great but is hard to get or too expensive), tabs for some forums, etc.

Since i'm often working for many weeks up to several months on a single project, it would be rather annoying to close FF completely, just to restart it the next day and looking all the stuff up again.

Basically it's just convenience. Plus, it shouldn't matter anyways. Something is slowly clogging up memory in FF when it runs for extended periods of time while doing lots of browsing. That simply should not happen, it should be able to do it's own house-keeping.

Greetings,

Chris
 
KoihimeNakamura said:
Firefox isn't that memory hungry over here unless I have flash videos running..
Click to expand...

Yea, flash tends to make things even worse. But still, as soon as i close the tab/window that has something using flash, i expect FF to free the resources again. After all, flash doesn't run on it's own as external program that may mess up stuff, but under the control of FF.

Plus, i have flash only when i really want to see some stuff, like YouTube, since otherwise all flash content is explicitely blocked by default.

But even without flash, after some weeks of continous use and heavy browsing, it clogs up the memory. When i freshly log into my desktop and start FF with all the windows and tabs i usually have, it uses a few hundred MBytes. After weeks, it sometimes goes up to 10 GByte or more, even if i close all the windows and tabs that i would not have by default, and only leave my default stuff open. That's just wrong.

Greetings,

Chris
 
Christian Klippel said:
Yea, flash tends to make things even worse. But still, as soon as i close the tab/window that has something using flash, i expect FF to free the resources again. After all, flash doesn't run on it's own as external program that may mess up stuff, but under the control of FF.

Plus, i have flash only when i really want to see some stuff, like YouTube, since otherwise all flash content is explicitely blocked by default.

But even without flash, after some weeks of continous use and heavy browsing, it clogs up the memory. When i freshly log into my desktop and start FF with all the windows and tabs i usually have, it uses a few hundred MBytes. After weeks, it sometimes goes up to 10 GByte or more, even if i close all the windows and tabs that i would not have by default, and only leave my default stuff open. That's just wrong.

Greetings,

Chris
Click to expand...

.... Suggestion: don't leave it open for weeks.
 
Christian Klippel said:
Lots of tabs for searching datasheets and part specs, tabs for EE related sources that i need during work, tabs for distributor sites to check if they have a part i'm interrested in (no sense in designing-in a part that looks great but is hard to get or too expensive), tabs for some forums, etc.

Since i'm often working for many weeks up to several months on a single project, it would be rather annoying to close FF completely, just to restart it the next day and looking all the stuff up again.

<snip>
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This is exactly the sort of thing that tab groups are intended to help with. They persist from session to session, so you don't have to look anything up again, but you don't have to have them all open at once.
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
Um. Er. The tabs are now readable. ;) I can adapt to the fact that they are in the "wrong" place.
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I thought I could, but after I tried to put up with it for about a week or so I loaded the plug-in and put 'em back on the bottom where god meant for them to be.

Also, the small icons turned out to be more important to me than I expected, but tabs on the bottom was the clincher.
 
Christian Klippel said:
Lots of tabs for searching datasheets and part specs, tabs for EE related sources that i need during work, tabs for distributor sites to check if they have a part i'm interrested in (no sense in designing-in a part that looks great but is hard to get or too expensive), tabs for some forums, etc.

Since i'm often working for many weeks up to several months on a single project, it would be rather annoying to close FF completely, just to restart it the next day and looking all the stuff up again.
Basically it's just convenience. Plus, it shouldn't matter anyways. Something is slowly clogging up memory in FF when it runs for extended periods of time while doing lots of browsing. That simply should not happen, it should be able to do it's own house-keeping.
Click to expand...
How is your copy of Firefox set to act on start up? See Preferences > General. I have "Show my windows and tabs from last time." That way I can close Firefox and restart it without losing my windows and tabs.
 
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