Originally posted by: kamper
Why doesn't ctrl-tab work for cycling between tabs as of 1.5 on os x? How else do I cycle through without the mouse?
Because apparently it's not normal for OS X apps to use ctrl+tab, so they disabled that feature on OS X.
Originally posted by: clandren
i've got one.
is there a way to close an open tab by double clicking on it? via plug-in or something else? i've always thought something like that would be useful
I'm pretty sure there are multiple extensions that do that. Poke around
Mozilla Update for tab-related extensions.
Originally posted by: Atheus
Why does it use so much memory? Why is memory usage reported in the task manager lower than actual usage? Why does memory usage often go up when I close a tab rather than down? Why does it not call free() until I minimise it?
It uses so much memory for one of two reasons 1) you're viewing big pages / pages with lots of images. If so, it has to hold the image data somewhere (memory). 2) It leaks. Developers know it leaks, and are
trying to get people to help them track the leaks down (though people seem to prefer to just complain).
The "memory usage" column in task manager is a largely irrelevant number. The one that matters is "VM Size". The "memory usage" goes down when you minimize it because Windows moves programs onto the swapfile and out of RAM when you minimize them. The VM size column won't change when you minimize.
"Memory usage" going up when you close a tab is likely related - if some Firefox code was on the swap file (e.g. the code related to closing documents & tabs), when you make it do something that needs that code, it gets pulled back into RAM, and "memory usage" goes up.
It "calls free()" when it's done with data or when garbage collection is running. The problem is, sometimes it doesn't free data it's done with (leaks, mentioned above).
Originally posted by: LoKe
Originally posted by: Atheus
Why does it use so much memory? Why is memory usage reported in the task manager lower than actual usage? Why does memory usage often go up when I close a tab rather than down? Why does it not call free() until I minimise it?
<snip>
On top of that it does something called prefetching, where the browser predicts what links you are likely to visit and starts downloading ahead of time in order to speed up page loading. you can disable this feature if you want to.
That's going to be negligible. Firefox only prefetches links on pages that tell it to prefetch, and VERY few pages out there actually tell it to do prefetching. Also, I think prefetching only downloads the page source (it doesn't turn it into a complete document), so it would only cost as much RAM as is required to hold some HTML + CSS + JS (a few KB).
The third reason for high memory usage is you having too many extensions enabled.
I've heard that explanation, but it's very lacking - a properly-written extension should cost at most a few KB of memory (unless it's doing something very complicated). Now, extensions CAN cause Firefox to leak more if the author isn't very careful. It's pretty easy for an extension to do something that will make Firefox leak.
There's a way to reduce the memory usage, though I'm not sure how effective it'll be for you. It should help significantly, though.
Text
That guy is ignoring the performance hit involved in decompressing all the images again when you switch tabs. He should file a bug about his idea though, to get an answer from people more familiar with the code.
I'm not entirely sure as to what would cause it to display lower in the Task Manager, I'll hunt for an answer.
If you disable config.trim_on_minimize, it won't go down (it tells Windows not to do what I mentioned above - Googling that pref name might give you more detail).
Originally posted by: Slicedbread
The reason it uses so much memory is because of the fastback feature in 1.5, it stores the pages in memory so it instantly appears when you click back or forward. It stores 5 pages by default so you can see how it can lead to a mess if you visited a site with pictures,flash, and video.
Setting it to 0 should fix it.
That's not really going to be significant. Fastback shouldn't cost you any more memory than 5 tabs, and if you close Firefox, launch it, check the VM size, open 5 new tabs and check the VM size again, you'll see that it's not a huge amount of memory. Plus, it's a huge slowdown to disable it - I'd take the memory usage any day in exchange for having quick back and forward.
Yes (though I prefer to work on
SeaMonkey)
Everybody starts somewhere. I still don't know nearly as much as a lot of other devs.
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