“One of the most interesting Mozilla Labs projects has now stagnated. Is the project dead? Does it have a future? The Mozilla developer who led the project tells all. Back in the summer of 2008, Mozilla began development of an experimental add-on called Ubiquity, providing new command mash-up capabilities for the Firefox browser. After just over a year of development, Mozilla is now pulling back on the effort, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been successful. The current release of Ubiquity is version 0.1.9.1, and was released on January 20th of this year. To date, Ubiquity has garnered more than 420000 downloads, according to the Mozilla add-ons site. So what is happening with Ubiquity now?”
Ubiquity doesn’t sound very ubiquitous right about now…
(Sorry, couldn’t help myself)
Ubiquity is or was AWESOME I use it almost every day when I use firefox.. the problem now is not ubiquity or jetpack or whatever the problem is that from the most popular modern browsers only IE is worst than firefox. Firefox is slow, startup time is slow, javascript engine is slow have many many memory leaks and the old addons makes things even worst.
Opera and Chrome start a little bit faster and are about twice as fast as Firefox in javascript benchmarks. Firefox uses the least amount of memory and none of the big 5 browsers have known big memory leaks.
So are you a troll or do you know something nobody else knows?
haha sorry dude ok I dont want to say that firefox is something BAD or something like this I really like firefox and firefox is my primary browser for development because of firebug but it has a lot of problems.
– it starts REALLY SLOW on my XP machine dont know why.
– when I use it for… 3 days without shutting down which is normal it cannot stop and if I see the memory usage it is 500mb+ sometimes even 750mb+ sometimes when I try to close it it takes 50% of my CPU and it cannot stop the memory just goes up goes up … (maybe saving some sessions dont know) Anyway I dont like it for daily usage.
– I really like firefox because it is free software and I hope that Firefox 4 will be something different but If I was the “owner” of firefox I definitely will rewrite it from scratch with lighter version of gecko engine without XUL and etc.
– with chrome it starts very fast it has good plugins some of them are great and they are not available on firefox which is lets say strange for me.
– I use Safari just for 1 special site which is rendered best on safari
P.S. I use a lot of extensions for all browsers so maybe this is the problem I have firebug, web developer, collorzilla, colored tabs, Meassure it and XMarks but even if I remove all of them the speed is not so much improved.
Alright that’s something valuable to read and react to. I don’t know how much time you are willing to spend on your problems but these ‘solutions’ popped in to my mind:
– sometimes your profile interacts in a weird way which you can try by creating a new profile or by using portable apps which gives you a totally separate Firefox and profile.
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Profiles
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable
– slow startup can be many things but I would start with portable apps to see if a fresh Firefox could solve it. A defective harddrive and file fragmentation could be other problems.
– huge memory usage is probably because of flash. The next Firefox 3.6 version will get separate flash so you can see the memory usage and it won’t freeze your Firefox. You can try this by using a test version. If you want to use extensions with that one you have to use this configuration:
http://nightly.mozilla.org
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Extensions.checkCompatibility
– in the past Firebug shut down the fast javascipt engine of Firefox 3.5 I don’t know if that is still the case.
– session restore should not give you extra memory usage. It could give you small freezes or slow shut down if your harddrive is horrible.
Main point to take: your problems are not normal and are certainly not by design
If you can’t solve them you should really file a bug because the Firefox devs really want to know about it.
I run FF on my Win2k notebook for weeks at a time. Just ABP and Noscript for add-ons, ATM (I like some others, but it’s rock stable w/ those two, so I leave the rest for beefier machines). It will use 200-300MB of 384. When shutting down, it does indeed use more RAM, and takes anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute, beating up my poor HDD as it does so. I regularly keep sessions with hundreds of tabs and several windows open.
On said notebook, Chrome is the only browser competitive in speed with FF (I don’t like Chrome’s UI, but they have the technical stuff done very well). As a session grows, Seamonkey gets slower, and Opera starts hitting the disk for every tab switch (I’ve had downloads die from timeout in Opera just due to trying to change tabs, and it taking too long–WTH!?).
FF likes RAM, but it handles not having too much better than others, both in Windows and Linux. My worst complaint about FF is that the devs keep adding the fsync bugs back in to release versions, then deny it for weeks, all the while saying that sane filesystem behavior (repeated fsync calls causing real synchronous sync operations is what is supposed to happen! It’s not a bad thing just because new fancy FSes have found workarounds to speed up DB apps!) is some kind of legacy software issue, then finally fix it again, rather than figuring out a memory/disk sync mechanism that would prevent it in the first place (like saving new files in a revolving fashion, trusting the OS and FS to save them now and again). As such, I try to never automatically update my installs (on Linux, I use custom builds just to bypass the package manager updates
).
Now, getting rid of XUL, I can agree with. Currently, Qt4 works on enough platforms, that I hope that port can eventually become a cross-platform GUI base (something that didn’t really exist when the Mozilla Suite was being created from the ashes of Netscape Communicator).
Edited 2010-02-27 01:01 UTC
@Fergy:
My copy of Firefox routinely runs at over 200Mb of memory usage after only a few hours. Even now, it’s sucking down 280Mb of memory. This is NOT NORMAL, even for a web browser. Granted, I do have more than just a few plug-ins, but most are not fluff (Adblock Plus, Tab Mix Plus, Weave Sync, TACO, BetterPrivacy, CookieMonster, FireBug, Live HTTP Headers, Source Viewer Tab, etc.)
@Joke:
I get some of the same problems, just after a much longer time period (I once used FF continuously for over a week! Ya, there was 1+GB memory used and I had shutdown problems.) It does start reasonably fast, tho.
It all depends. I have 50 tabs open with 470MB memory usage with 15 extensions. Now I can check with Chrome that netvibes, gmail, greader and youtube use ~111MB freshly started. That leaves 7.8MB per tab. That seems very reasonable to me.
About the memory leaks in Firefox
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/forum/1/555873 its a new one right ?
P.S.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=firefox+memory+leaks
If you google enough you can find a resource which claims that Apple cures cancer
Do you have bug for that?