An Ode To Firefox

[lauralh]

Although it sucks up memory faster than a Tijuana hooker, the extensions can't be beat. I've used as many as 30 but I think I've whittled them down to more or less the bare essentials:

WebmailCompose translates "mailto" links for your favorite webmail site, instead of nasty OE.
Book Burro loads up at Amazon and shows various other stores' prices for the ISBN you're viewing. Also, you can see if your local library has a copy of the book.
DownThemAll is one-click downloading for any files on a page.
Adblock is a necessity.
Fasterfox tweaks stuff for optimal browsing.
HashColouredTabs gives each tab a different color for a different URL.
Read Easily lets you disable/enable styles on a web page.
Session Manager saves and restores ALL the tabs when Firefox closes/crashes.
PDF Download gives you the option NOT to run Acrobat, and can even render HTML.
Greasemonkey lets you (or other internet folk) write userscripts for Firefox.

Comments

[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.

[herbaliser.livejournal.com]

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.

[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.

[herbaliser.livejournal.com]

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

[zorbathut.livejournal.com]

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.

[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.

[zorbathut.livejournal.com]

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.