from Hacker News

Firefox 15 available to download, finally fixes add-on memory leak

by mrsebastian on 8/28/12, 2:02 PM with 183 comments

  • by homosaur on 8/28/12, 4:18 PM

    If they did finally solve this, I might be nearly back to using FF as a primary. With Chrome I have had more and more problems with certain sites (not all legacy either) the last few months. Also, I've been impressed with the improvements in speed and reliability of Firefox in the last couple of releases. Everyone remembers the days of 15 second FF startup because you had a handful of add-ons turned on.

    Now, I've gained some discipline and stopped installing 50K plugins, but Firefox has done the heavy lifting here. On FF 15 I only have a small amount of plugins (partially because I abandoned its usage) but on my work Mac, it goes from shutdown to usable in 685ms.

    If anyone you know is delusional enough to think that competition doesn't improve products, just point to FF. The existence and popularity of Chrome has turned FF from a decrepit bloatware to a sleek modern web racehorse. I'm proud of those guys because in all honesty, I was convinced they would fail. Kudos.

  • by technojunkie on 8/28/12, 2:43 PM

    I applaud the Mozilla team for its huge effort in squashing the FF memory leaks. That must have been such a huge pain to solve and it took many years. Well done and congrats.

    That said, I really hope the authors of plugins like Firebug, Adblock Plus, and LastPass among many others will do their parts to get rid of bad memory leaks.

    Using OSX 10.7.4, I opened up FF 14.1 to about 325MB-350MB of memory. After downloading FF 15 and restarting, I saw no change in my memory consumption. Once I disabled the three I mentioned above, I was only then able to start FF around 250MB, still really high but better.

    I want Mozilla and Firefox to succeed as I really want there to be solid competition for Chrome. Please, add-on authors, do your parts too!

  • by UnoriginalGuy on 8/28/12, 3:54 PM

    Unfortunately I'm still sticking with Chrome. I love Firefox but Chrome loads "instantly" while Firefox: even 15 still has a noticeable lag when you launch it.

    Firefox has always felt very unresponsive in terms of the UI and loading times. The only browser I've found less responsive is Safari (IE, is very responsive).

    Memory consumption was an issue at one stage in Firefox's history but they mostly fixed that (from 1 GB/usage down to like 200 MB~ after a day of browsing).

  • by mccr8 on 8/28/12, 2:45 PM

    Here's some detailed information about the addon leak fix from the developer who fixed it: http://blog.kylehuey.com/post/21892343371/fixing-the-memory-...

  • by darklajid on 8/28/12, 3:07 PM

    Unfortunately I got addicted to pentadactyl after a couple of threads here. Which broke on 15 and made me go back from beta to stable.

    I wonder what changed internally to lead to irc comments that in effect said 'it's a major undertaking to make pentadactyl work for this new version' and this commit: http://code.google.com/p/dactyl/source/detail?r=2557fa601030...

    Really don't want to miss that addon anymore.

  • by option_greek on 8/28/12, 2:59 PM

    I'm really loving their fast release schedule. There is noticeable improvement in performance with each release (may be placebo effect ? :) )

  • by lmm on 8/28/12, 3:27 PM

    How many releases of firefox have we had now that claim to have fixed its memory problems? I make this at least four, which is a few too many for me to believe it this time.

  • by o_rally on 8/28/12, 3:24 PM

    > a completely silent background updater

    This is not an improvement. I do not like it when my computer changes itself without asking.

    - Does no one question this anymore? - Why should we blindly accept every single update unquestioningly? - Why should we be forced to deal with the problems they introduce after the fact? - Why will no one contemplate that constant automatic updates are an attack vector unto themselves?

    The more you force your feedlot of end-user livestock to tolerate potentially disruptive updates, the more they will grow accustomed to not being in control of their own machines, and the less likely they will be to notice a real problem as a signal amidst all the noise. Honestly, why even bother pretending to have control of our machines anymore.

    When people ask me for help now, my eyes glaze over, and I am often forced to respond "I don't know what the fuck that thing is doing. It clearly has a mind of it's own."

    This, my friends, is an affront to the very sensibility of the control an "open source" project, should ostensibly extend to it's community and user base. And spare me your bullshit about "Oh, hay guyz, you can just go on GIT or SVN and look at the code yourself!"

    It's time-consuming, technical, and inaccessible to normal people, never mind the complications of different platforms, and the shifting sands of dependencies, commits and continuous integration.

    YOU KIDS STAY OFF MY LAWN!

    /rant

  • by TazeTSchnitzel on 8/28/12, 2:52 PM

    Mouse lock support for FPS games is really exciting for me. I've wanted to make first-person WebGL games, but before this was available it simply wasn't feasible.

  • by ralfn on 8/28/12, 5:38 PM

    The WebGl demo video is impressive though. Not just the execution, but the fact that this isnt made specificlly for webgl.

    Its c++ code compiled to Javascript. This seems to suggest PS2/Wii era games can easily be ported to fully native fully crosplatform html5 applications.

    I do wonder about security. The videocard drivers are not hardened against abuse: yet they live completely outside of any sandbox. And WebGL is just passing these OpenGL commandos unfiltered to the drivers.

    Good news for Intel, with their open driver stack. And bad news for NVidea and ATI with their messy legacy drivers and firmware full of unchecked liscenced closed-source 3rd party code.

  • by isaacaggrey on 8/28/12, 2:29 PM

  • by CodeMage on 8/28/12, 5:08 PM

    Does anyone know how these "silent updates" handle add-on compatibility? I prefer being "hassled" by update notifications if an update is going to break my favorite add-ons.

  • by polshaw on 8/28/12, 5:06 PM

    There has been some talk about ubuntu here-- what is the best way to keep up to date with browsers on ubuntu (/linux).. there is no 'check for updates' within firefox, and the repositories are often out of date [1]

    1. to be fair, i don't know about FF, i can't really complain that it might be a day out of date.. but chromium is way behind. Also what about living on the beta/aurora channels?

  • by ck2 on 8/28/12, 2:53 PM

    Also 16b1 and 17a2 coming out sometime tomorrow.

    October 9th: Firefox 16 desktop/mobile, 17b1, 18a2

    November 20th: Firefox 17 desktop/mobile, 18b1, 19a2

    Schedule pace seems insane but getting used to it and I'm fine with the way it doesn't seem to break anything.

    Firefox 99 in 2017?

  • by specto on 8/28/12, 3:44 PM

  • by sswezey on 8/28/12, 8:34 PM

    A feature that no one has touched on is the JS debugger included with FF15, you can now set break points and walk through JS calls.

  • by DigitalSea on 8/28/12, 9:24 PM

    If Firefox really have fixed the issues with memory leaking, I might go back to using it more again. I was one of those developers that switched over to Chrome like the majority, I have a feeling for some it's a little too late for Firefox to be fixing an issue that has plagued the browser since around version 1.5.

    I still recall years ago Mozilla even denying that there was a memory leak and were always quick to blame plugins for the leaks and while that's true in some instances to an extent, Chrome showed us that bad plugins can be managed correctly and not break your browser performance.

    Giving it a shot now, Firefox can't afford to blow this again.

  • by mmuro on 8/28/12, 3:10 PM

    I guess this hasn't been seeded everywhere? 15 is still in beta according to the website.

  • by Xyzodiac on 8/28/12, 3:42 PM

    And it breaks pentadactyl, I feel entirely helpless.

  • by veidr on 8/28/12, 3:11 PM

    Finally.

  • by lhnn on 8/28/12, 5:09 PM

    Just for the record: Old people don't like changes, so when Firefox silently changes and updates the wording of a menu, or changes the new tab behavior, etc., my 70 year old dad bitches and calls me to find out what is wrong with his computer.

    Silent updates: only for bugfixes. Sure would be nice if version numbers meant anything these days.

  • by webwanderings on 8/28/12, 2:31 PM

    I don't like to use Chrome. Updates for IE are not available because I am still on XP. Safari is also not updating itself for Windows.

    So what are the options left any more?

    It seems things are getting pathetic in the browser market.