I&#39;ve even raped and killed a mountain panda in the hills of Shaanxi.

yeah that doesn't seem to fire anymore for some reason. I mean, i get 4-10 megs when I do it.

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henry.livejournal.com

well it only works to a certain extent, I think it just flushes old tab data that firefox clings to for some reason. I'm using...47M right now, minimize and it drops to...5M, then climbs back to 20M once I start using the browser again.

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I find it interesting that Firefox tends to bloat and explode on Windows, but the Mac version merely slows any other open applications to a crawl by monopolizing processor power.

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FireFox had a place and time, now dead and over.

unless i was running win 2k or older, or a mac/sun/linux distro/whatever

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I'm not using IE as long as it's bolted into Windows.

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" the browser will be a stand-alone application, rather than integrated with the Windows shell, and it will no longer be capable of acting as a file browser."

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer

"Reversal: Next IE divorced from new Windows"

-- http://news.com.com/Reversal+Next+IE+update+divorced+from+Windows/2100-1032_3-5577263.html

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Fine. I'm installing it at work.

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well, just make sure you install ie7, even though it's beta. ie6 is even deader than FF now.

the leads on ie6 development should have been shot.

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I'm not stupid. You linked 7. I downloaded 7.

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easy buddy - i wasn't implying anything.

low on bran today?

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I'm a little cranky. Yes, IE7 is fast, but I don't like how I have to verify that everything is genuine, or how it treats me like I'm 6 years old.

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easy there fellah... didn't mean to imply anything

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And why must I restart my computer to run IE7?

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files to be written over or added to are in use. at least that's MS's explanation.

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kraex.livejournal.com

I'm completely lost without mouse gestures.

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ernunnos.livejournal.com

Firefox is currently using 182 meg on my system. That's with 8 tabs open in 2 windows, 3 tabs containing Ajax applications. 90% of the people I see complaining about Firefox's memory use are running a ton of plugins. Check out here (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions) to see which of yours have known memory leaks. And there are plenty of unknown ones as well.

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i just rebooted it because it was taking up 200+mb with 8 tabs open in one window, one tab with an Ajax application. It regularly goes above 300 when I am not watching. I am only using the plugins listed above, and none of them have memory issues.

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ernunnos.livejournal.com

Known memory issues. Firefox by itself doesn't spike. I run it for weeks on end without closing the application, much less rebooting my system. If you wanted to, you could uninstall 'em all and reinstall individually to see which one does it, but that could take a while.

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i meant restarting FF. I am not willing to go without any of those plugins, so it doesn't matter.

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130 tabs, 520MB RAM, and a constant 70% CPU use. And that's minimized. (The CPU use really confuses me. What the hell, Firefox. You're minimized. Stop rendering things.)

I blame Firefox for it because there's no reason they couldn't track memory usage, and that would make it super-easy to detect which plugin was causing the problem. But they don't. Fists of anger.

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ernunnos.livejournal.com

130 tabs?! Jesus. Just a few of those running active content like animated GIFs or Flash would account for the CPU. (Just because an app is minimized doesn't mean it can stop processing stuff. That model works for handhelds, but people expect their YouTube videos to keep playing anyway...) Never mind housekeeping on that much stuff. I'm not familiar with Firefox's internals, but I highly doubt they require plugins to be compiled against a profiler. They could, I suppose, but it's not trivial.

Sometimes I'm glad I grew up in an 8-bit world. It keeps me from driving systems to the point of failure just because I can.

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None of them have Flash because I've got Flashblock off, and that's after a refresh. The vast majority of them do have animated GIFs, but personally I wouldn't mind at all if it stopped playing animated GIFs when I, you know, can't see them. In fact I'd prefer it if it did, because then I'd still have my CPU.

And it shouldn't be burning CPU on housekeeping when I'm not doing anything. Just sloppy coding. :(

Plugins, btw, are almost entirely Javascript - it is possible to add DLLs but almost nobody does that. So they don't really need to be compiled against a profiler to track memory usage, just add hooks to the javascript interpreter to tag allocated memory.

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read all 6 pages, and tell me what you think.

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2006/08/22/internet_explorer_7_v_firefox_/1.html

here's another comparison, this time including Opera

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1990859,00.asp

and a big old IE against the world article

http://internetweek.cmp.com/179101486

any case - the grief i had supporting FF for apps/users/network services looks to be over. long live IE 7.

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Internet Explorer is such a large improvement over version 6 that it's hard to imagine what would get you to bother downloading it, unless you're a Mozilla fanboy or an extensions addict.

THAT'S ME EXTENSIONS ADDICT

although honestly the ones above are all I need.

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... but it's not, it's the actual shell you use to operate the computer. And, unlike a shell in a *nix environment, it *can't be uninstalled and reinstalled* - which, when you combine that with the fact that it's designed to be infinitely extensible *by the content you browse*, makes it unsafe at any speed.

Free Software philosophy discussions aside, IE will be unsuitable for use as a web browser as long as MS inists on both making it a godawful uninstallable, unREinstallable tangle of crap woven into the core operating system AND making it extensible.

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*shrug*

my coding days are long behind me... but my msft blue badge buddies assure me the OS is IE free.

could be their lying, the bastards.

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According to the redmondmag, they're at least mistaken.

The majority of IE's notorious security flaws stem from its pervasive integration with Windows. That is a feature no other Web browser offers -- and an ability that Vista's Protected Mode intends to mitigate. IE 7 obviously won't remove all of that tight integration. Lacking deep architectural changes, the effort has focused instead on hardening or eliminating potential vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, this approach requires Microsoft to anticipate everything that could go wrong and block it in advance -- hardly a surefire way to secure a browser.

The typical MS approach - instead of fixing fundamental design flaws, just tack on more crap 'til it looks like it works again.

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and a quick google gives me at least a dozen sites that say it's NOT integrated with Windows.

something tells me it's gonna be a "have to wait until it ships" to see who is bs'ing whom.

me, i'm claiming nothing

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Personally, the whole OS-integration thing doesn't interest me at all. IE doesn't have to be integrated with the OS in order to install tons of spyware on it.

I don't like MS's security history, conformance history, or design history, and I'm not using IE until those issues have been fixed *and maintained* for several months.

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If IE wasn't integrated into the OS, though, you could dump it and reload it in response to spyware issues - and spyware issues wouldn't be so immediately system-wide pervasive.

I get so tired of trying to explain to people who say "and I even get pop-ups when I don't have IE open!" that, if their computer is booted at all - even in Safe Mode - then yup, they sure do have IE open. Sigh.

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I'm not entirely sure I agree with that. You don't get spyware from IE being open, you get spyware from going to webpages with IE. I've got IE on both my main computers (obviously, since they're Windows) and I don't get any spyware. On the other hand, if someone found a hole in Firefox and used that to install spyware on my computer, I would still have spyware on my computer, despite Firefox's lack of integration with the OS.

There are issues with IE's amount of integration, like the fact that other apps can embed it and could then theoretically open up evil webpages, and that you can't change that plugin to Firefox (although this is, at least partially, due to the fact that nobody's implemented the API for Firefox. A lot of people suspect it would be quite doable to swap the plugin if someone would just write the interface needed.) But on the other hand I don't think I've ever seen an otherwise-benign app get someone infected by embedding IE. And having an HTML renderer available for embedding is a damn useful feature to have.

The only real problem with IE, IMHO, is that it's basically a monoculture and that it's recurringly buggy in exploitable manners. I've never really had an issue with how embedded it was, and I don't think (besides the monopoly leverage factor) that contributes at all to the spyware problem.

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If your firefox installation gets hopelessly fucked up and corrupted - which can happen - you can simply dump and reload it. You can't do that with IE.

Regarding the malware dangers of it being open all the time, the majority of the malware you get by browsing with IE installs itself *in* IE. Thus, without IE running, the malware doesn't run. Unfortunately, since IE is *always* running, if you have malware in IE, you've *always* got malware running. By contrast, with a browser that is merely a browser, it is less likely for malware infestations to leave the scope *of* that browser.

Regarding embedded IE being a security issue - I have DEFINITELY seen apps embedding IE for HTML rendering result in spyware infestations. As an example, a car dealership I've consulted with was getting constant crippling spyware infestations on a weekly basis, until I finally got them to switch to Firefox, at which point they stopped - until suddenly, after two months, they started getting infestations again. The culprit? An employee using Windows Media Player for streaming radio. Some of the channels he was hitting - using WMP only, never opening a "web browser" per se - had malware embedded in the HTTP: streams being fed to the embedded IE rendering engine in WMP. Result: malware.

Modularity is a huge issue. I don't necessarily have a problem with a system-available HTML rendering library, my problem is that if you can't dump and reload it, it makes it dramatically more difficult to keep the system stable. If you're only familiar with Windows, it may be easy for you to accept this as "just how it is, a lot of stuff just can't be dumped and reloaded like that"; whereas if you're familiar with *nix type operating systems, you'll be used to EVERYTHING being modular, replaceable, and even do-withoutable - everything from the GUI rendering engine itself to the window manager to even the *text* based shell(s) for command-line control.

Complete modularity of the OS makes "black-box" troubleshooting and repair possible - got a problem - malware OR simple corruption - in your HTML engine? Drop it and reload it. Still got a problem? Then that wasn't it - look for rogue or corrupted services running. Find one of them that isn't behaving as expected? Drop and reload *it*. There's literally nothing there that you can't simply unload and replace with a new copy in a known good state quickly and easily. By comparison, if you get corrupted IE, you can't just dump and reload IE - you have to hunt through literally hundreds of registry entry points to *repair* your existing IE. If malware installs a rogue service on your machine, you can (sorta) easily just remove the rogue service - but what if it instead *corrupts*, say, the RPC service? You can't uninstall and reinstall RPC. Worse yet, the workstation service?

You get the idea.

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