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Why does Firefox hog memory?


FoxHound

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@ Analada

While the pipelining and cache tips are appreciated, there are other isues to consider in terms of the speed by which web pages are rendered.

I use Firefox (the latest 2.0x release, and the last 1.5x version) in the course of coding web pages, to test that everything is looking and working as it should in arguably the de facto browser for web development. I have noticed that, for example, Firefox 2x's speed and responsiveness when rendering web pages that include absolutely-positioned elements are noticeably slower than when loading the same pages without those elements. This difference in speed is particularly noticeable on systems with sub-1Ghz CPUs. Combine floated elements with absolutely-positioned elements, and slow systems can really start to grind.

It is a page-/document-rendering issue, and not a network-/connection-speed issue.

This is just my experience, but there seems to be a sizeable number of people who on occasion experience sluggishness in Firefox.

Edited by bristols
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Also, it's worth noting that the /prefetch:3 command would not be very useful in vista, unless of course you have superfetch disable.
Sorry, I jumped the gun and assumed that it was XP instead of the bloatware Vista... ;)
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That extension doesn't really add anything. It just changes some of Firefox' preferences.

look again , sir. It adds prefetching, control over max pipelining requests, and several other... um...preferences, that increase speed and performance.

Once I started using it , the memory issues went away.

Maybe it was coincidence.

There is a reason why it's called FasterFox.

Opera is a good browser as well.

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Firefox is coded in javascript. Have you ever noticed how long can a piece of javascript take to display some thing a native program does immediately ?

It's simply an interpreted language and it takes time.

OK, I have to admit : firefox is not written in javascript but in javascript+xml (=xul). But when xml was introduced, speed was a concern for it too. Imagine the combination.

Hmm Seamonkey....isn't that Mozilla Suite?

Yes but it is really different. It doesn't use xul for its interface... yet : next major release will use xul too. :ph34r:

Anyway, for performance, both for rendering quality and speed and resources, the best are imho kmeleon and khtml/webkit based browsers (I don't like Opera so I don't use it and therefore can't say anything about it).

However I don't know whether they run well under win9x.

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Firefox is coded in javascript.

This statement is a bit misleading. The rendering engine and its libraries are coded in C++. However, much of the code that drives the user interface is done with JavaScript.

firefox is not written in javascript but in javascript+xml (=xul).

XUL stands for XML User Language. It is an XML-based language to describe user interfaces. It's not JavaScript + XML, though I can see where the confusion might come from, because XUL interfaces have hooks to JavaScript.

Yes but it is really different. It doesn't use xul for its interface... yet : next major release will use xul too.

Incorrect. SeaMonkey uses XUL and JavaScript too. However, unlike the Firefox developers who tend to rip out a lot of C++ code to rewrite it in JavaScript every other major release, SeaMonkey has less of its interface behaviour coded in JavaScript.

You're probably confusing it with the migration to toolkit, which is something entirely different.

kmeleon

K-Meleon uses the same rendering back-end as Firefox and SeaMonkey, but its interface is not made in XUL. Instead, it's native Windows code. This leads to a more responsive user interface and faster start-up, but with the sacrifice of cross-platform portability and less flexible extensions support.

However I don't know whether they run well under win9x.

K-Meleon runs pretty well on Win9x (though the latest release has issues on my Win95 system). Safari probably doesn't.

What uses less memory... FireFox or SeaMonkey?

People who switch to SeaMonkey have sometimes noted that it seems to consume less memory. This could be because the interface doesn't use as much JavaScript, and better coding. The SeaMonkey team has a long history of porting Firefox code to SeaMonkey, which more often than not they had to fix first because it had problems that the Firefox hippies didn't take note of or slacked off on. Like outright bugs, or bad performance because of low quality code.

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