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Tell me about it.

webOS fans are not going to like my Palm article :/.

Actually I'd say this is a symptom of a MUCH uglier disease which is thus: The ONLY reason we are seeing HTML V5 pushed is because of Cupertino using their muscle and frankly its just not ready yet.

Apple did NOT pick HTML V5 out of the goodness of their hearts, they did it to kill the market for Flash games. But HTML V5 isn't ready, it can't even do a third of what Flash did and what it does do it does poorly because its just not RTM quality yet. take ANY video, any res, and put HTML V5 VS Flash at the same resolution, HTML V5 H.264 will suck up cycles and memory like a drunk hitting a free mini-bar, its just awful.

So the bigger problem is how to fix HTML V5 without Apple ramming it down our throats before its ready. As Moz is finding out you have to have seriously beefy hardware just to get the stupid thing to run and with "thin and light" being the order of the day if everything goes to HTML V5 i hope everyone likes battery life measured in minutes because it ain't gonna be pretty.

A non-trvial app is usually more then displaying some fancy HTML. Ever maintained a large Javascript codebase?

No.
FirefoxOS performs admirably well running HTML5 apps on low-end hardware while high-end hardware with any other OS is worse.

The FAT32 patent was gutted, and exfat is not necessary, in fact almost no devices support it yet (that's why you generally see the 32GB size limit).

SD itself is a patented technology. Of course, FAT32/exFAT add additional costs.

Well, technically they could just support SD-Cards and just format them with EXT4 or something and use them then.
For third world market that might make some sense, for western makets they should come with more build in storage and omit the SD-card slot.

Well, you'd be wrong!

http://imgur.com/dH3GO8b

You were saying? (I have 6 chrome Windows Open).

Also process isolation is a good idea, because when one tab locks up/crashes I just have to reload the tab. I am sure there are a host of other reason why it is a good idea.

Edited 2013-02-28 15:14 UTC

OH for goodness sake.

It was any sort of proper test, but while Chrome remains responsive throughout a working day (probably due to the process separation), Firefox just gobbles up memory until it just crashes and dies.

Edited 2013-02-28 18:59 UTC

I've never had that problem; it works fine even for my parter, who for some reason refuses to close tabs, and normally has over 200 open on a windows box.
Problem sites *will* crash the browser, but you just don't open that tab when you reload the browser - they load on demand, so when the browser restarts, only one tab will actually load.

Differing experiences and all, but this is with only two tabs open, and every extra tab increases chromium's usage by a lot more than it does firefox's - it's pretty much as close as they ever come in usage for me.
http://img541.imageshack.us/img541/6753/rams.png

It all swings and roundabouts. But with most traditional computers having at least 2GB of memory, it really is a none-issue. What is a problem is the browser becoming un-responsive.

With Chrome this just doesn't happen as often as Firefox older IEs.

I use modern Firefox quite heavily on Windows 7 at work, and on Ubuntu 12.04 at home. Older Firefox versions suffered horribly from responsiveness and runaway memory problems, and I switched to Chromium at home to avoid it for quite some time. But I recently switched back to Firefox, and the problems seem to have been completely resolved.

Understand that I still like Chrome, and didn't switch away because it had any serious problems, I just find Firefox now works better for me.

(When I say "quite heavily", I mean that I typically have 30-40 tabs open in 3 browser windows on my home machine, and perhaps 10 in a single window at work.)

All that said, I'm about 3,217x more excited about Ubuntu Touch than FirefoxOS, but I'll definitely give them both a try.

I killed the process after I took the screenshot.

I see the same memory gobbling behavior on firefox under both linux and windows.

As far as I can tell it's not related to what I'm doing, just a slow continuous leak of some sort that persists even after I close all but one tab.


about:memory doesn't look very meaningful to me, but right now with nothing but osnews open I see js-non-window at 80MB and js-main-runtime at 90MB. Everything else is much lower in comparison so a pure guess is that's it's a JS related leak. But for all I know it might be one of the plugins I've installed.

On my linux box it usually takes a week or two before firefox starts to crawl at a few gigs of ram. This happens regularly because the system is always on. On the windows side the computer is restarted every day, so although the memory usage climbs, it never becomes unusable.

I haven't tried chrome for comparison.

Fergy,

As a dev myself I'd feel it necessary to take out all the variables by turning off all the plugins and confirming the leak still exists. I'm not thrilled at running without adblock/ghostery/firebug for a week.

I'd be kind of surprised if they aren't already aware of the problem, so it's probably a matter of finding a similar bug and saying "me too".

I know an other reason why they leverage the network operator.

They want people with less money to also have (cheap) smartphones and these people don't have creditcards.

So how else do developers get payed ?

Europe is not the US. Cellphone prices, subventions and plans work very differently here, at least in Spain, and surely in Holland.

Well I'm very surprised about 3rd world on any networking — from "carriers" to capped <100 megabit internet with some "six strike program": http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/heres-what-an-actual-six...

Oh, this is America? Sounded like Nicaragua.

Oh you americans.. I remember you labeled Europe as "banana republic" when we declined some retarded software patents.

Hilarious country. Atleast I hope this is not true: http://techrony.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Human-Genome-Project...

Edited 2013-02-28 09:15 UTC

I doubt that Firefox OS will ever be able to run faster as my optimized C#/Java/C++ applications.

The JavaScript JIT better be a very good one.

Both C# and Java use JIT...

Yes but Java and C# have better defined datastructures. One of the problems with compiling JavaScript is that the central datastructure is essentially a hash-table, which makes it very hard to convert to efficient machine code, though there are several tricks to try anyway and then go back to interpretation if it fails.

It's called Type Inference and has been part of Firefox since the start of 2012:

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2011/12/20/major-javascript-enhancemen...

Its a neat trick, but how far will it get you? How long before you run out of obvious optimizations? How long before you run into the brick wall that is the language itself?

It just doesn't make sense. JS will always be worse off because it performs a lot at run time, that is done at compile time (with much more diligence) in other languages.

There simply isn't a comparison between the performance of a JS JIT compiler and what a good optimizing compiler or even C#'s JIT can do.

It is true that JS has geniuses working behind it (esp. the V8 team) but JS as it stands now isn't ready, and I'm not sure it'll ever even become good enough.

Javascript is now about twice as slow as C in most cases. Where other scripting languages like Perl are more than a 100-times slower than C.

Where something like Java might be 1.3 or in certain cases faster than C (a JIT compiler can optimise stuff at runtime which normally a C-compiler would not build that into the compiled binary).

Javascript is basically the fastest scripting language right now. Faster than Lua for example, but Lua can still be faster because it is easier to exchange data with existing C-code. Lua is also a lot more memory efficient.

So yes, Javascript never was the best choice, but when did you ever see the best technology win ? Take VHS Betamax as an example. The "problem" is, Javascript is widespread and "good enough".

Also supposedly FirefoxOS uses less memory than Android because there are a whole lot less layers involved. So FirefoxOS might actually win from Android "native" apps on a lot of devices.

I read somewhere a few years ago that in servers memory usage as much power as the CPU. CPU's have become much more efficient. So that would mean Javascript could have similar power demands than Android/Java.

And the C# JIT has over a decade of work going into it, and Microsoft's extensive language and compiler experience from even longer than that.

JS doesn't do even a fraction of the optimization even a clumsy C# JIT does. Start doing install-time native compilation of C# and the story gets even better.

Just take a look at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/bananabread and then please comment on whether you still think that JS JITs can't do "meaningful optimizations".

You mean a 1996 game quality in 2013 where the GPU is doing most of the real work, yeah really impressive.

Edited 2013-02-28 15:16 UTC

Impressive, and JS has come a long way, but it is a little silly to argue for its merits for CPU bound performance by using a GPU bound game with yesteryear graphics.

Can you do me a massive favour and communicate to the other Firefox guys that the desktop version is still a pile of shite.

The inspector tools are shit unless you use Firebug, which is third party so it probably leaks fuck loads of memory everywhere.

When are you guys going to get you are spreading yourselves too thinly.

Yes, it is true some operators in some countries do offer that possibility, but in most countries you end up paying more for 100% carrier free phones and many people avoid it.

Just to clarify a bit my previous comment, although I was going to Espoo on a regular basis I was actually located on Düsseldorf site.

Also if I'm not mistaken with FirefoxOS only a small part of the firmware updates of the system is handled by the network operator.

They only handle the lowest parts (like kernel and base OS), Mozilla handles the rest (just like on the desktop automatic updates of Firefox).

Would you say that the basics are already there? (calling, texting, calendar and phonebook sync)

Apps covering basic needs like calling, texting, camera and picture gallery, are all provided by the Gaia project and shipped on the phone so you never have to download them.

I meant - are they any good