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November 20, 2007

Firefox 3 Beta 1: The Memory Use Says It All

Duncan Riley

151 comments »

I’ve been a long time Firefox fanboy. I was one of the 10,000 people who contributed, and had their name featured in the NY Times back in 2004. I’ve long preached to anyone who would listen that Firefox is a better alternative to Internet Explorer, particularly back in the days prior to IE 7.

Then my love affair with Firefox started to end. Firefox 1.5 (and the earlier versions, I started at 0.7) never skipped a beat, and unlike IE it had tabs, which were a god send to me as it was to many others. Mozilla launched Firefox 2.0, and suddenly my internet experience started to sour. I’m a heavy tab user, so it’s not unusual for me to have 15, 20 and even more tabs open, it’s how I read my feeds in the morning, opening up the stories that interest me for later reading. Firefox had what has been called by others “memory leaks,” which in laymen’s terms meant that it tripped out your memory on a PC, froze up and crashed…and far too regularly. I became a Mac user this year, and the first thing I did when I started up OS X for the first time was to download Firefox, hoping that perhaps it was a PC problem. It wasn’t. Same memory problems, same crashes. Mac fanboys told me that it was my fault for using plugins, so I deleted Firefox and started again without the plugins. Same problems, constant freezing (even with 4gb on a MacPro) and crashes. I switched to Safari for a time, and as much as it was a decent browser, it doesn’t play nice with all sites, in particular with the WYSIWIG backend on Wordpress blogs. Then came Flock 1.0. I’d never been a Flock fan before, always believing it to be nothing more than Firefox with plugins (Flock is based on the Firefox engine). Having watched the demo at TechCrunch 40 I downloaded the beta of Flock 1.0 and surfed away without incident. Some how the folks at Flock had tweaked the underlying Firefox engine to stop the memory issues.

firefox.jpgI was hoping that Firefox 3.0 might finally fix the blight that was Firefox 2. Firefox 3 Beta 1 has been released for testing (download here) so I fired up Firefox 3 and Flock with the exact same tabs opened, hoping that perhaps Mozilla had finally heard the protests of its loyal user base. The stats (image right) say it all.

It didn’t crash in my testing, but having said that the test was fairly short. Firefox was never a browser to crash immediately, usually teasing the user with functionality for some time before deciding that enough was enough, then freezing or crashing all together some time later.

Others have more positive reviews of Firefox 3. I can only hope that by the time it gets to full release it’s as stable as Firefox 1.5 was.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 4:51 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  10. Lee Clemmer dot com » Blog Archive » Flock and StumbleUpon

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Comments

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  1. Jon

    November 20th, 2007 at 4:56 am

    Firefox, if anything, has been much needed kick in the butt to EI to make some much needed improvements. I still use it as my main browser but I don’t really see ANY reason that compels me to jump to version 3.0. What I got now works fine, sure it crashes here and again but no more or less then XP ;-)

    Jon

  2. Duncan Riley

    November 20th, 2007 at 4:58 am

    Jon
    fair call, which despite the crashed I never abandoned it when I was a Windows users. Try Flock though, you’ll be surprised, even if you never use the social networking functions.

  3. Don C

    November 20th, 2007 at 5:09 am

    I’ve switched to Flock. It does a great job of importing all your Firefox presets and you can hide much of the ’social’ stuff. It looks and feels exactly like Firefox except for the inability to close it without doing a Force Quit.

  4. Chris Sack

    November 20th, 2007 at 5:11 am

    I guess I won’t be upgrading just yet..

  5. elvirs

    November 20th, 2007 at 5:12 am

    I have been using firefox since its v1.0.2 or sth and it has been my favorite browser, it used to crash at the beginning but since 1.5 it works just fine, only when browsing facebook and youtube I use opera, from my experience flash videos load better in opera, and with facebook, redirects and stuff work faster on Opera than Firefox. Everyday i see more of my friends to use firefox than IE, at our university firefox comes preinstalled on all computers and half of people use it, its a great peace of software, and will continue to gain marketshare.
    good luck to firefox folks…

  6. The Foo

    November 20th, 2007 at 5:13 am

    think i’ll be sticking with FF 2 for a while — no reason to do it besides curiousity. Can’t afford anymore bugs and playing around with getting it to work. I am seriously thinking of digging out my old FF 1.5 download and reinstalling that one.

  7. Chris Przybycien

    November 20th, 2007 at 5:15 am

    As much as I share your views on the decline of quality since FF2 I think you’re jumping the gun on FF3. This is still in beta. Beta is about perfecting functionality not optimization. Wait until they start rolling out release candidates and then we’ll see if they’re on a slippery slope or the road to recovery.

  8. Andrew Masyk

    November 20th, 2007 at 5:15 am

    Switch to Opera - the fastest and most stable browser i’ve ever worked with. Install a normal skin for opera of your choice, i think they even have Firefox skin and you’ll be amaised what it can do.

    After using Firefox and Opera, i’ve seen that page load times is much much faster in Opera, mostly because i see the page before it loads, rather than wait until 100% of html or compleate image is loaded, i can see 50% of that image and make a fast judgement what’s on page.

  9. JD

    November 20th, 2007 at 5:22 am

    Thanks for the tip, Duncan. I’ve been getting annoyed with Firefox for some time but not enough to switch back to IE. I’ll give Flock a shot.

  10. Andrew Masyk

    November 20th, 2007 at 5:27 am

    Here’s a good review in comparison by the way

    http://willlangford.com/2006/0.....s-opera-9/

  11. Nils Koerber

    November 20th, 2007 at 5:31 am

    Andrew I agree!
    Opera is since years the browser of my choice. Fast and stable!
    Only a few sites don’t work with Opera - for example stumbleupon…

  12. Stefano Buliani

    November 20th, 2007 at 5:47 am

    You probably have to remember that the alpha or beta they have released now is a debug build, hence much more memory/cpu intensive due to the additional logging to provide bugs feedback.
    Speed and heaviness can’t really be judged from a beta/debug release.

  13. Calvin

    November 20th, 2007 at 5:48 am

    about the opera thing, is the speed thing a gimmick? how much more faster can a browser be when we have broadband at 1Mb - 10MB? Is it going to make any difference?

    I notice, the real difference between Opera and other browser is the pre-fetch and the way Opera loads a page, Opera loads the content of a page in the cache and then display it with a blink of an eye, whereas other browser display the content as they load… illusion? gimmick?

  14. børge

    November 20th, 2007 at 5:58 am

    I’ve heard that Flock is based on Firefox 1.5. That might be the reason why it doesn’t have the same memory issues.

  15. Marek

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:06 am

    I have used Firefox for years and it never crashes, not even when I have tens of windows simultaneously open. “I’ve long preached … that Firefox is a better alternative”. Sure. Have you been paid by MicroSoft or are you just unable to use computers?

  16. Marek

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:07 am

    Heheh :)

  17. F.D. Athow

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:14 am

    Firefox crashes on me but even then, I am staying with it. I’ve tried several others before (Opera, Maxthon, Netcaptor, IE etc etc etc). But I’m not budging from FF for now. Ironically, the only thing keeping me from moving is not FF but its addons like scribefire, Google Notebook and many more, all of which are not available elsewhere. Hey, it’s like saying that Windows is crap and then, not moving elsewhere because wireless drivers are not working on Ubuntu.

  18. erick

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:14 am

    Firefox can easily takes 250mb - 500mb of memory of which I have to kill it, restart it and repeat the process throughout the day. Since im a .NET developer, I need all precious memory for vs2005 that I can muster.

    @Marek - This isnt a new issue, it has been a nagging issue that seemingly has been getting ignored by the FF team for a long time. Try not to be so cynical because you aren’t experiencing the same problem (which I am willing to bet you are but haven’t noticed it).

  19. James Quintana Pearce

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:22 am

    I’m another vote for Opera, which I’ve been using for 6-7 years now. It’s a great browser, very fast and very stable and (I think) the first one to use tabs. I’ve had so many tabs open that all I could see was the red “x” box to close them and it went fine — the only time it crashes is if I have a lot of tabs open AND I land on a dodgy site.

    Calvin: Opera is faster, it’s not an illusion, it gets tested. However, you’re right — with the kind of broadband speeds people in the US have it doesn’t matter. I’m in a small town in the Australian bush though, so for me it does matter.

    In terms of comparing Opera to Firefox I don’t have anything much to say — I prefer Opera but it could be just because I’m more used to it. Likewise, everything people tell me is cool about Firefox Opera has had for a long time. The only thing that seems certain is that both browsers are better than IE.

    The only con with Opera is that not all webmasters test for it, so sometimes pages just don’t work. It’s very rare but it does happen, and in those cases I use IE or Firefox (my banking service doesn’t work on Opera, for example). I do hate it when webmasters won’t even let me try with Opera, I just get an “unsupported browser” message when the site doesn’t have anything that would be a problem.

  20. Barry

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:26 am

    I’ve been using Firefox since the beginning. It’s always been rock solid for me. It crashes so infrequently that I cannot remember the last time it happened, and I routinely leave it up and running for days and days. I see no evidence of a memory leak on my system. I have absolutely no reason to switch and am looking forward to version 3.

  21. Andy Gongea

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:36 am

    Flock rules so far. It is a great social platform as well a good web developer platform. Almost all Firefox exstention are compatible and the user experience is great. Firefox is great too but for the last 3 months I’ve been enjoing multiple crashes so my trus is not on this product.

  22. Joe

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:40 am

    There are some settings for firefox which allow you to tune the memory usage. Can’t remember them, but a google search should turn them up quickly.

    I am hooked on the mouse gestures plug in for Firefox and I can’t think of switching unless some other browser comes up with gestures support.

  23. Harry

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:45 am

    I’ve been using Firefox for quite a while and i love all its functions. especially plug ins like firebug since i am a website programmer. but , the memory leak is really irritating. i hope they will have that fixed after the release (official) of FF3.

  24. Danny

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:45 am

    @Marek

    >Sure. Have you been paid by MicroSoft or are you just unable to use computers?

    Wow. Incredibly lame comment. Even a cursory search on Firefox’s memory issue will yield tons of links supporting Duncan’s claim. (To say nothing of the fact that the alternative he presents is not a MS product.)

  25. JonM

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:46 am

    I’ve switched to Safari 3.0. It still doesn’t play nice with Wordpress, but it rocks on most sites and I’ve found it uses considerably less memory/CPU than Safari 2.0 - and needless to say Firefox too.

  26. Ennis

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:47 am

    The Flock guys deserve a lot of credit. I’ve recently downloaded Flock 1.0 and was pleasantly blown away. The performance is great, and although it takes some getting used to with all of the feature complexity, once you figure it out, it’ll hook you.

  27. Recursed

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:57 am

    Way to beat up on the first, BETA release of a new version of software like its a finished product, Duncan. You guys are supposed to tech industry experts, right? At least your WYSIWYG editors work…lol.

  28. Warren Benedetto

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:58 am

    Flock became my new favorite browser with the latest release. However, it DOES still have a memory leak. Currently, it is consuming 178k mem usage …. yesterday it was up to 468k before I had to kill it in the Task manager. There is a recent post about it in their blog here: http://www.flock.com/blog/floc.....ase-update . It seems to indicate the problem has been fixed in the latest release, but I have the latest and the problem persists. Anyone else see this happening?

  29. Warren Benedetto

    November 20th, 2007 at 7:03 am

    D’oh! Just realized that Flock’s “recent post” about the memory leak being fixed is actually a year old. My comment still stands though: great browser, memory leak still there.

  30. Merlin

    November 20th, 2007 at 7:15 am

    I’ve been using Mozilla since i stopped using Netscape. Before Netscape, i used Mosaic. And after Mozilla, i switched to the Firefox, since the earliest versions. Over the years, i tried all the other browsers around, including Opera and the different IE.
    I still use Firefox, i don’t plan to change this, and i will most likely upgrade to FF3 when it will be out of beta. But i agree with the general idea developed in this post : FF2 is really too memory-consuming. And i hope FF teams will improve this as soon as possible. If FF wants to keep facing IE7, it is a major issue.

  31. David G

    November 20th, 2007 at 7:25 am

    Guys, i have been using the new FF for the past 6 hours or so and i have encountered two MAJOR problems. First, there is NO BACK BUTTON on the browser… So its impossible to move backwards… Is anyone else experiencing this?

    Second, when you open a new tab the cursor does not start in the URL bar. SO you then have to move the mouse up to the URL bar to type in a new URL. ITS DRIVING ME CRAZY!!!

    In all fairness it does seem to be moving smoothly with the exception of the aforementioned.

    Let me know if anyone is having the same issues.

  32. Harry

    November 20th, 2007 at 7:35 am

    @ David G

    yea that problem with tab and enter is annoying. forces you to restart every once in a while…

  33. Sam

    November 20th, 2007 at 7:52 am

    Memory leaks are a huge issue in Firefox - I hope they do much more work on this before it’s released. It’s no good to blame plugins for this…

  34. damon

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:01 am

    seems like they are looking into memory issues, with fragmentation (not leaking) being a key culprit…

    http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11.....mentation/

  35. Mack D. Male

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:13 am

    Say it with me now…Opera Opera Opera!

    http://www.opera.com

  36. Ernie Smith

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:14 am

    I’ve been using the beta for the last few days, and … well, you’re not giving it a fair shake.

    There have been minor issues here and there (quicktime video doesn’t want to stay in one place), but it’s crashed on me exactly zero times. And I generally keep the program on for a number of hours with dozens of tabs, and the experience is far smoother than on Firefox 2 so far. I actually quite like the new beta, and I’ve probably used it a lot ore than you have. It sounds like you’ve used it like 20 minutes and then wrote a review.

    All I know is that I’ve been waiting for Firefox to not be slow for some time, and that some time is today.

  37. Sam Lustgarten

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:16 am

    I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to Force Quit out of Firefox. I usually have it freeze up on me about 3-4 times per day. This must be the buggiest it’s ever been. I’m quite disappointed and I think I might try out flock.

  38. børge

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:17 am

    @ David G:

    I do not have those problems, but here’s some tips: First: Use backspace or Alt + Left arrow to move backwards (or right click on the menu area, select “Customize” and add the back button yourself).
    Second: Use Ctrl + L or Alt + D to move the cursor to the address bar without having to reach for your mouse.

  39. tomás pollak

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:22 am

    ouch. haven’t the mozilla guys even HEARD about these memory leaks?

    I’m still waiting for the day Opera becomes Open Source… getting nearer every day. :)

  40. Paul Short

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:27 am

    @ #27 Recursed, read the article again. Duncan said he’s been having he same problems since FF v1.5.

    I’ve had different versions of IE, FF and Opera on my computers for years now and I’m going to be using Opera more from now on. Especially since I’ve been getting into more flash and video heavy browsing. FF crashes within minutes on sites like Justin.tv and bebo for me but both IE7 and Opera do fine.

    I just need something that works.

  41. andrew

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:29 am

    Nobody else seems to have said it yet, so might as well pitch this one in: Camino.

    It’s built for the Mac and miles better on it than its big Mozilla brother Firefox.

    Can’t speak with any authority about the memory usage, but however often I think about going back to Safari, I don’t last long before going back to Camino

  42. Jon

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:34 am

    I can’t say I’m experiencing the same issues with Memory Leaks with Beta 1. Coming from 2.0.0.9 a few weeks ago (I downloaded the Beta before it was announced) the memory usage has much improved.

    I work on a webapp, so I constantly have several tabs of that open, as well as Google reader and multiple news stories or other reference materials open.

    Using FF all day my memory would slowly creep upwards to 500+ mb with 2.0.0.9, but with 3.0b1, I haven’t gotten my memory over 135mb.

    Still a lot of memory to be used, but at least it’s not 500!

  43. EH

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:41 am

    Of course this 3.0 beta is a beta, but it’s not fair to castigate people bringing up memory issues due to a lack of optimization in the 3.0beta. The fact is that they’re complaining that the optimization that would be premature for 3.0 never happened with *2.0*. They’re late!

    These complaints have been around a long time (and if you’ve never seen FF take up 500M+ and take 10 seconds to switch tabs…), so memory is going to be one of the first things that people check in 3.0. Think about it: it’s such a problem that people are hoping 3.0 includes the nonexistent fixes from 2.0. What a world, eh?

    Joe@22: “I am hooked on the mouse gestures plug in for Firefox and I can’t think of switching unless some other browser comes up with gestures support.”

    Opera had mouse gestures years before the FF plugin came out.

  44. anon

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:47 am

    And how much did you pay for it? And how much did you love IE before? Stop complaining and start contributing.

  45. Sean

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:51 am

    I’m a new mac user — can I ask what program/widget you were using to list your current processes.

  46. Bjorn

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:56 am

    I think the time is ripe for a new tiny light open-source browser to become an internet star. Only requisite is that its websites have the appropriate number of gradients, rounded corners and glass reflections…

  47. Nick

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:56 am

    I like Flock a lot. Does anybody know of any plugins for the Linux version that allow you to view .pdf, .doc, .xls, .ppt, .odt, etc. files in the browser? I’d be sold on it if so.

  48. abhishek

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:01 am

    I dont care for FF plugins. If AIRoboform starts working with opera, I will immediately switch.

  49. tones

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:03 am

    @Sean:

    iStatPro - http://islayer.com

    Also available as menubar app.

  50. Steve Severance

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:08 am

    I completely agree. I have switched to flock and my browser just stopped running out of memory.

    Steve

  51. WinAndFun

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:09 am

    I will give a try to the new Firefox, but until know i didn’t have any crashing problem… I usually have about 10 tabs open

  52. Ollie Parsley

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:10 am

    The one thing that annoys be about Firefox is the memory usage at my peak of surfing and researching i have about 6-7 windows open and i look at the memory usage and its massive. I would have thought it was near the top of they list as its more important than a normal feature request to me.

    Ollie

  53. Ian

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:10 am

    If your complaint about FF3 is the memory leaks (which I’ve definitely encountered with FF2) then why is your graphic CPU processes?
    “The stats (image right) say it all.”, no the stats show that it’s CPU intensive which is a completely different point, if you were trying to backup your memory leak theme then you should have done a screen capture from Activity Monitor.

  54. Bryan Bartow

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:11 am

    @Duncan, I hate to burst your bubble, but that screen shot has nothing to do with memory usage. The “Processes” section in iSlayer shows CPU usage. All your screen shot shows is that Firefox happened to be using significantly more CPU cycles at that very instant than did Flock. I’m not saying that Firefox doesn’t hog memory (as of version 2 it does), or that unusually high CPU usage isn’t problematic (it is), but your writing alludes to the screen shot providing visual evidence of Firefox’s high memory usage, which it absolutely does not.

  55. Schrep

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:12 am

    What exactly is that screenshot of? Looks to me like CPU usage rather than memory usage (but hard to tell given how little of it you show)? Firefox 3 has done a bunch of tuning to memory usage (http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/15/less-fragmentation-coming-in-firefox-3/) and not all of it is in Beta1. It will continue to improve through Beta2 and beyond.

  56. Stephen Levinson

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:17 am

    Firefox was always a CPU guzzler. They try to pass the blame on to Flash player but Safari doesn’t have the issues that FF has.

    FF is crap!

  57. Geoffrey Arone

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:18 am

    Flock IS based off of FF 2.0 and the team has spent an inordinate amount of time working on memory leaks. For those that wondered what took the product so long to get out, now you know. Not only did they add a ton of features, but they managed to fix a lot (not all yet!) of the memory issues. Nice work Flock team!

  58. mike bartlett

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:20 am

    I agree with you entirely Duncan - I wrote a blog post a while ago called “The Great IE Experiment” where I tried using IE for a week again because of these problems, but couldn’t because I missed a few plug-ins (Google Browser Synch).

    What I can’t believe is that Firefox continue to turn a blind-eye to this problem. It exists and before they start building even more features they need to address this or they will become the next WordPerfect.

  59. Marta

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:26 am

    Thought about using Read it Later Extension?

    You can add your morning feeds to the list and read them one by one, w/out having to open 15, 20 tabs. Great substitute for bookmarking.

    http://www.ideashower.com/idea.....-it-later/

  60. /V

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:39 am

    So, let me get this straight: basically you are disappointed because a BETA VERSION runs worse than a tweaked previous version?

    Like saying that longhorn beta runs worse than Win 95 embedded?

    What’s next? Complaining because your Hummer when you drive it on the route 66 at 80 mph in reverse gear runs on more fuel than your moped ?

  61. Chris

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:42 am

    “I am hooked on the mouse gestures plug in for Firefox and I can’t think of switching unless some other browser comes up with gestures support.”
    Maxthon has had gestures built-in as long as I can remember.

  62. tony_daysog

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:43 am

    I know absolutely nothing about software, hardware, computers, etc. I have a link to techCrunch just to pick up morsels of info here and there. So, I just want to express my appreciation for your descirption of what’s righ and wrong with Firefox. For the longest time, I just thought it was my computer that was the cause of all those crashes and lock-up you referenced, especially, becuz, like you and many, I like to open up multiple tabs. Now I see that it probably was that **and** the quality of the Firefox version I downloaded some time ago. Hopefully the new one is better. So, long and short: thanks for your insights.

  63. Christop Wagner

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:47 am

    Using FF since 0.8 or 0.9, not sure.
    Crashes were quite frequent in pre-2.0 times.
    Now? FF doesn’t crash. I’m a heavy user, about 20 add-ons, normally having open from 5 to 30 tabs. Yeah, the memory usage is high, but only if memory is available. And minimizing FF reduces even that greatly.

  64. Sean

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:52 am

    I thought Firefox always had a memory leak problem. 2.0 is no worse than 1.5 or 1.0 for me, though. And I don’t have any CPU usage issues either, unless I have firebug activated (which is rare). Usually idling around 0 - 1.5%. I’m used to having to restart it about once a week once the memory usage hits over 500MB. Sucks, but not really that big a deal, and still 5 thousand times better than Internet Exploder.

    This is on Windows XP SP2, dell laptop, 2GB RAM.

  65. Public Broadcast CHannel

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:52 am

    Finally someone talks about the elephant in the room.

  66. AnonTroll

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:55 am

    I have been a faithful FF user for a while now but I wholeheartedly agree with Duncan, it has become so bloated and buggy. Everytime I close FF, it crashed and generates a page fault, grrr. So much for better quality software because it is open source, it feels a lot more like Microsoft buggy proprietary software.

  67. Don Wilson

    November 20th, 2007 at 10:02 am

    Wow, this is easily the ugliest browser beta ever. Just look at the downloads window.

  68. Pran Kurup

    November 20th, 2007 at 10:11 am

    I have been a regular FF user and found similar problems lately with freezing and crashing. I never liked IE 7 at the beginning, but I am starting to like it as I get familiar with the UI. Maybe MS is back to its winning ways!

  69. Andrew Masyk

    November 20th, 2007 at 10:16 am

    It’s good to know all the facts of FF reality:

    http://mywebpages.comcast.net/.....Myths.html

  70. Charles

    November 20th, 2007 at 10:27 am

    As a Mac user I know that Safari is faster, but it IS incompatible with a lot of sites.

    I’m looking at Flock, but still favour Firefox. It IS the market leader now beating out the perennial security-leak browser IE by a few percentage points. I wouldn’t recommend IE to anyone.

    I could be wrong, but I’m still convinced that the Firefox problems are the plug-ins. There is apparently no quality control over screening memory demands before unleashing them on the public.

    The Mac’s Activity Monitor is my gauge. If all my normal apps start dragging to a halt, I’ll have a look at how much of my CPU is being sucked up by Firefox. If it’s something like 80%, I’ll just start killing plug-ins and before long I’m back to 5-10%.

    In short I blame the plug-in suppliers for not warning us about taking over your computer to do whatever they do, and the Firefox people for not pre-testing the often disastrous consequences of plug-ins that often have a marginal advantage anyway.

  71. jeff scott

    November 20th, 2007 at 10:28 am

    Another vote for opera, its awesome and i load 20-30 tabs up when i start it up.

    Comment for James Quintana Pearce , opera has a fetauer somewhere that lets u set what u tell websites what browser you are using, so u can basically tell the sites you are using ie but in reality you are using opera.

    I also love operas speed dial and wand tool, very usefull features.

  72. look

    November 20th, 2007 at 10:29 am

    ugly!!!

  73. King Tut

    November 20th, 2007 at 10:32 am

    Not all the blame lies with a buggy application. Give it some time and they’ll fix it.

    A lot should be laid at the feet of site developers - you mention Safari not working so hot on some sites. Smart developers make it so pretty much any current, or previous generation, browser will work on their site (AJAX/DHTML abuse anyone?).

    From my blog (shameless plug):
    —-
    Adden-dumb: *sigh* I know at least one of you nit-wits are going to observe that I’m using IE 6. On Win 2000 no less. orly? So you say: “Well, obviously the site [jellyfish.com] won’t work on your brower ijit…upgrade!”

    Yeah, not going to happen for a while…I like to develop my sites to a fairly low common denominator. That way, when my mom, or any one of the approx. 34.5% that still use IE 6 ( http://www.w3schools.com/brows....._stats.asp ), use any of my sites, they don’t get this fuck-up Jellyfish crap.

    I like to make money on the Internet - not impress ego-driven VC’s.
    —-

  74. Bjorn

    November 20th, 2007 at 10:45 am

    Firefox is open source. If Flock really fixed the memory issue why didn’t they contribute that back into Firefox. They just take but don’t add? I’m not supporting such ethics.

  75. Chris Stegner

    November 20th, 2007 at 10:49 am

    It’s a beta. Pointless post, comparing apple seeds to oranges.

  76. Eric Marden

    November 20th, 2007 at 10:53 am

    Switched to Camino from Firefox to avoid the memory leaks, and only use FF when I need FireAnt, WebDev Toolbar, etc.

    Makes me want to check out Flock now.

  77. EH

    November 20th, 2007 at 10:58 am

    Charles@70: I run nearly no plugins (adblock and sessionsaver, pretty much) and I get memory problems. This is mostly traceable to my 100+ feed page at Netvibes. Some of my long-ago research indicated that there is a problem with the Javascript implementation that causes RAM usage to irretrievably increase. Leave a copy of FF+Netvibes up for days to see what happens.

  78. Victor Trac

    November 20th, 2007 at 11:06 am

    I’ve been using Flock for the last few weeks, and on a Gentoo linux system, it’s slightly less stable than FF 2.0. They both require a kill and restart after 1-2 days, but flock seems to just “disappear” every so often whereas FF never did. However, I’ve stuck to flock because I’ve found that I actually do use the people stream, which in turn has turned more of my attention to facebook (never did use it much before).

    For now, I’m using flock as my browser and FF for development.

    I would love to use Opera, but in my experience it’s been less stable (at least on linux) than either Flock or FF.

  79. Jones

    November 20th, 2007 at 11:11 am

    15 to 20 tabs open at one time? Wow!

    I have 70 tabs open in one FF window and 4 tabs in another window right now plus 50 extensions loaded in 2.0.0.9 and FF is rock solid. I haven’t crashed in a long time.

    From Taskinfo app:
    Process PID % CPU % K CPU LT % CPU LT % K CPU Time K Time InMem KB Private KB Total KB
    + Firefox 1,664 0.15% 0.11% 8:21 1:38 296,544 283,640 413,656

    Duncan, you need to upgrade that old 486 [lol]

  80. Pecos Bill

    November 20th, 2007 at 11:28 am

    Another mozilla variant is Camino. You might give that a whirl. Apple may have made Safari 3 more to your liking as well. That is part of Leopard and the latest Tiger release: 10.4.11. Hope that helps….

  81. Sebastian

    November 20th, 2007 at 11:44 am

    To me, the Firefox memory usage has never been a problem. Firefox is fast for me, as long as I deactivate Firebug (completely, not just per-site; if Firebug is activated, opening a new tab in Firefox 2 needs between 1 and 5 seconds and even more on Firefox 3).
    Firefox is also pretty stable, and I don’t care if Firefox crashes once per month on websites that most of the time use some weird Flash-whatever-dipshit.

    I tried Flock, but its UI makes me go crazy. I can’t stand that, it’s really awful.

  82. Chris L

    November 20th, 2007 at 11:51 am

    Safari seems to work fine with Wordpress now. If you have Mac OS 10.4 you need to install the latest system update (10.4.11) which gives you Safari 3.

  83. Eric Shepherd

    November 20th, 2007 at 11:55 am

    I use that same utility — that display is actually of current CPU usage, not memory usage.

  84. zota

    November 20th, 2007 at 12:00 pm

    I hate to pile on, but it’s hard for me to trust a pre-release software review when the cited evidence is wrong. That screenshot is from the CPU usage section of an OS X dashboard widget called iStatsPro . To show memory usage, you can run top from the terminal, or use Activity Monitor as noted above.

    I use firefox with 3-10 windows open, usually with 5-20 tabs each window. After I got rid of buggy plugins (which caused *serious* problems) it hasn’t crashed. But the memory issue is a pain — I have to restart firefox every few days to clear up the sluggishness…

  85. gerald

    November 20th, 2007 at 12:32 pm

    Firefox/2.0.0.9

    God I hate and love firefox, when its working I’m in love,
    but it has lost bookmarks, passwords, add ons, etc.

    What ever is going on it seems to have fixed its self?
    Self healing, my google toolbar came back, add ons started working again,
    lot of stuff, self healed, ???, no downloads…

    Think I’m swooning again.

    G

  86. Dominik Hahn

    November 20th, 2007 at 12:36 pm

    I tested the Firefox Beta for Mac and I am glad that I bought Saft for Safari. :)

  87. Valerie

    November 20th, 2007 at 1:15 pm

    Duncan, you really have 20 tabs open at once??? We don’t you use a Firefox extension like Speeddial or iMacros? Especially with iMacros I was able able to automate a large part of my daily routine web browsing.

  88. Jim Price

    November 20th, 2007 at 1:17 pm

    15 or 20 tabs? I can get that many open on my old laptop which only has 96MB of RAM. On windows I used to have to restart firefox once a month, usually on a tuesday (sound familiar?), but I’ve just moved to Linux having seen what Vista has to offer, so I’m hoping not to have to restart firefox quite so often. I normally have over a hundred open tabs in more than ten firefox windows going by the time I get to a restart. Things get slower when I run out of memory, but they don’t get unreliable. I’ve seen half a gig in use by firefox, but the stats said it had peaked at 770MB, so plenty of memory was being handed back to the system. On that particular occaision, after restarting firefox (I have it set to reload my last session) it was only using about 250MB when it finished reloading all the previous pages, so there is a bit of an issue there, but its not a reliability one for me. I tend to use 8 or 10 extensions on most machines. It would be interesting to note how many people who think firefox is unreliable have lots of other apps crashing on their machines.

  89. Folletto Malefico

    November 20th, 2007 at 1:39 pm

    41.6% of what, exactly? :)

    I don’t think that 41.6% of something untold in an instant x could tell anything. ;)

    Please, if you want to post about a software, do some testing before criticizing… at least, with a unit of measure for that percentage! :P

    …no, I’m not saying that they’re false, since I didn’t tested it. ;)

  90. Kula bácsi

    November 20th, 2007 at 1:42 pm

    Safari 3 uses 350MB memory after 3-4 hours of browsing on my machine. Is this normal?

  91. Sebhelyesfarku

    November 20th, 2007 at 1:57 pm

    Duncan Riley is a clueless moron, the screenshot shows CPU usage not memory.

  92. Asa Dotzler

    November 20th, 2007 at 2:04 pm

    The chances that Firefox 2 or 3b would use significant more memory or CPU when compared apples to apples (clean profiles? loading the same content? open the same length of time? etc.) with Flock is just silly. If anything, Flock would likely use a tad more RAM just loading up that much more UI and CPU usage should be a wash since Flock doesn’t make significant changes to the core Gecko code.

    My guess is that Duncan’s got something flakey in his profile — either a busted extension or some left-over cruft from old extension installs. There’s just no other reason for Firefox and Flock to behave so differently.

    Duncan, can you try something for me, please? Export your bookmarks and then create a new Firefox profile (lifehacker has a nice instructional here http://lifehacker.com/software.....231646.php ) and do the same for Flock. Now import your bookmarks into both and start them up with the new profiles. Load whatever bookmarks you had before into both Firefox 3b and Flock. Wait till both are completely loaded and then compare both working set (memory) and CPU time in the Windows Task Manager. Make sure that you’ve actually performed the same exact steps in both browsers.

    What I expect that you’ll see is Flock and Firefox using almost identical resources. I’ve done this comparison several times on both XP and Vista and the two are repeatedly showing almost identical results.

    - A

  93. Mike

    November 20th, 2007 at 2:08 pm

    20 tabs? um. close some? for feeds I’ve found this thing called a “feedreader”. I prefer it to xml ;-)

  94. mint question

    November 20th, 2007 at 2:08 pm

    “I have used Firefox for years and it never crashes, not even when I have tens of windows simultaneously open. “I’ve long preached … that Firefox is a better alternative”. Sure. Have you been paid by MicroSoft or are you just unable to use computers?”

    the issue was about being a memory hog, not crashing. And if you haven’t experienced that, you are in the .001% of users that hasn’t.

  95. dan

    November 20th, 2007 at 2:28 pm

    if you want a different face on the engine inside Firefox, try Netscape Navigator. yes, it’s back, and it works well enough that i’ve substituted it for Firefox.

  96. Kalid

    November 20th, 2007 at 2:31 pm

    Hey guys, 20 tabs isn’t that unusual. Open popurls.com in the morning, ctrl+click a few dozen times [open link in background] and you have your daily reading. Plus your feed reader, email, blog, site stats, and google news and it’s easy to get up there.

    I’ve started using Opera [lean and mean!] until firefox sheds some weight.

  97. Andrew Masyk

    November 20th, 2007 at 2:32 pm

    More Opera stats about open tabs: currently i have 18 tabs opened, one of which is streaming mp3 from a flash player, total RAM used: 168 Megs, never in my life i’ve seen it using more than 250 Mb RAM…

    500 Mb in Firefox… just one word - WOW.

  98. Valerie

    November 20th, 2007 at 2:37 pm

    I use Firefox for automated web testing via the iMacros extension. I currently have 15 (!) instances of Firefox with 10 open tabs in each instance running on a Vista test box - no problems, no memory issues and no crashes.

  99. xxdesmus

    November 20th, 2007 at 3:11 pm

    v2.0 is just fine. I’ve never had a problem with Firefox (besides the obvious memory whore stuff). I think Firefox has crashed maybe 10 times in recent memory. Not bad considering how often it’s open and for the duration of time that it’s open.

  100. Matt

    November 20th, 2007 at 3:44 pm

    Keyword= beta. See, in the software and application business, “beta” actually has meaning. It means- and this is insane- that the application is actually in testing. It’s not simply used to cover! Obviously it’s not going to be perfect, that’s why it’s in BETA. I’m not really sure if it’s right to release a review of a test version, to be honest.

  101. Don Park

    November 20th, 2007 at 5:06 pm

    the author of the story really needs to respond to the claims that the screenshot shows CPU usage and not memory usage!!

  102. Jono

    November 20th, 2007 at 5:32 pm

    OMG v3 is worse!?!?

    2.0 is annoying enough (I am also a heavy tab user), with it brining my system to a halt. I constantly have to alt-ctrl-del it so as to close it without loosing all my tabs.

    I think I will also give flock a try until the FF boys get their act together with the memory leaks.

  103. Jeff

    November 20th, 2007 at 5:50 pm

    It’s using over 700MB for me with only 2 tabs open. Within 2 minutes of installing Firefox 3, it crashed.

    http://jeffchan.org/archives/f.....ing-700mb/

  104. rcfee

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:33 pm

    I have 20 tab opened now. FF2 memory used = 135 K

    Never really experienced serious problem with memory leak.

    Tried Safary, Opera, Flock before but decided to stay with FF for it’s extensions.

  105. lewis

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:33 pm

    I have three tabs open in Firefox right now, this page, Google Reader, and a CNet story on Firefox, on a Powerbook G4. Firefox is currently using 73% of my CPU, just sitting there, and Safari is using 10% with 12 tabs open. I find that I have to use Firefox for certain sites, especially anything with the FCK editor or certain Ajaxy sites, for example. One big culprit seems to be Flash advertisements, and ads like the ones on this page. WSJ.com ads drive Firefox to a crawl unless you turn off java and javascript.

  106. David Mackey

    November 20th, 2007 at 7:25 pm

    Firefox is a bit of a memory hog and does crash a decent bit, which is frustrating. I’ve been considering trying Flock 1.0 with all the positive press. I also have IE 7, Safari, and Opera installed.

  107. Allan

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:02 pm

    I’m really happy with Firefox. I’ve been using it since version 1.5. I have never had it crash. I don’t really know why, but there you go.

  108. Kuldeep

    November 20th, 2007 at 10:21 pm

    try this link…it helped me a bit…

    http://www.thinktechno.com/200.....n-firefox/

  109. batman22

    November 21st, 2007 at 1:39 am

    I’m getting sick and tired of all these geeks missing the big picture. Give me a coddam browser where I can use one basic feature over and over again without the thing crashing.

    “Oh Duncan, you shouldn’t be using so many tabs” — In this day and age, how can you not use as basic a feature as tabs? You make an airline reservation, you’re opening tabs left and right to check different airlines and prices and maps, no? Pretty soon you got 10+ tabs. Hello!

    “Oh, Duncan, that’s CPU percentage, not memory” — Who cares?!!! Duncan made his point, it’s crashing his system. Period. Done.

    “Oh, Duncan, it’s beta, you’re not supposed to criticize it” — If you release a product to the public, you released a product to the public. I hate this “beta” b.s. What a sorry excuse for products that shouldn’t be released to the public in the first place. If it ain’t ready to come outta the oven, don’t bring it out. What the hell is wrong with you tech geeks? Am I the only one who’s sick and tired of “betas”? Don’t let me download some piece of crap that won’t work.

    Finally, how about us day-to-day peons who are slaves to this recession and barely gettin’ by, who are still running XP on a Pentium III with no more than 1Gb of RAM? Of course you guys who spent a buncha money on a hummin’ desktop don’t flinch if memory keeps leaking and leaking. Hello, not all of us have upgraded like you have. My old XP laptop works. I don’t have a few hundred bucks to toss around and buy better chips, when all I need is a browser, Word, Excel, and Adobe PDF to be productive.

    Now gimme a browser that won’t break for crissakes.

    Two years ago, I scoured the web and found such a browser: Maxthon. But lo and behold, they got techie and geeky and released Maxthon2 with all these useless bells and whistles — and a huge memory leak to boot. I re-installed Maxthon1 and now it’s auto-upgraded to version 1.6 which is, of course, leaking memory now. Guaranteed 120Mb per session if you happen to go over 10 tabs. Yes, that mere 120Mb slows down my 1Gb, wimpy GHz system.

    Thanks for the lead to Flock. I’ll try that. Otherwise I will downgrade back to Maxthon1 all over again.

    But how can you write a post about browser/Firefox memory leaks and not talk about Maxthon1 and 2? Btw, no one has mentioned the other huge memory flaw of Firefox, which is that when you close out of it, the process still exists and you have to go to Task Manager to kill it off and free your memory.

    Bottom line: you need a low memory footprint like the rest of us with older systems, get your hands on an early version of Maxthon1 (or the new Flock?). It works. Simple.

    If you gotta new system in which gigahertz and RAM make memory leaks irrelevant, then shut the hell up. You can’t feel my pain.

  110. Timothée

    November 21st, 2007 at 2:29 am

    Same for me. Lack of memory and bugs is the problem of FF. I just can’t let it switched on all day long, that i would enjoy to do ! But i’m obliged to restart it every 1-2 hours otherwise i bug my FF and lost things !

  111. none

    November 21st, 2007 at 2:42 am

    I find it strange people like you talk about browsers like opera doesn’t exist. Opera is a GREAT browser that is seriously under-appreciated.

  112. Tibi

    November 21st, 2007 at 2:42 am

    I’m writing this from an Ubuntu Gutsy System with Firefox 2.0.0.8 and 25 tabs/windows open - the system monitor shows for firefox-bin CPU at 1% and Memory at 263.8 MB. I see nothing special.