Oh, my! I'm about to abandon Firefox, in favor of Chrome...

[uOpt]

There is no way I can use Firefox as long as it slows down so much on use. I don't need a 3-second pause when hitting the spacebare in a text field. Every 3 minutes.

I have to say, though, that many usability items are better in Firefox than Chrome. Emacs keys in text don't work right, the spacebar suggestions in chrome don't do what I want and they in FF. I hate the truncated URL display when you hover over a link. I don't need all of Chrome's space-saving, I have a 1200x1600 (rotated) monitor. It's fine.

As we speak my big problem is that Chrome picks too small fonts for many websites. Selecting bigger fonts somehow doesn't follow in those websites. Scaling with control-mousewheel is not a solution since it instantly scale up both the pictures and the general layout and I run out of horizontal space. Everything looks fine in FF.

But alas FF is so slow it is actually not usable.

 

[VinDSL]

[...]alas FF is so slow it is actually not usable.

Yep! That's the bottom line...

The other day, I was helping a (computer savvy) co-worker find something on the web.

He asked, "Why is your browser so fast? Everything just pops up."

Before I had a chance to answer, he said, "Oh, is that Chrome?"

LoL! I guess, the word is spreading. :awe:

In view of all the experimenting I've been doing, I decided to wipe Firefox (et al.) off this machine and do virgin installs of Fx 3.6.9pre & 4.0b1. I had gotten lazy, and was letting the configs co-mingle. I installed Fx 4.0 in /opt and created separate profiles for them.

Here's how I'm calling them from the menu/panel:

/usr/lib/firefox-3.6.8pre/firefox -no-remote -P "Firefox3"

/opt/firefox4/firefox -no-remote -P "Firefox4"

This, of course, necessitated several hours of configuring with 'essential' add-ons, importing bookmarks, passwords, et cetera.

While, normally, this would be 'new and exciting' -- I'm here to tell you, it was a painful experience!

Firefox is slow and getting s-l-o-w-e-r!

The good thing is...

Firefox is *looking* very Chrome-ish now. At least, they modernized the interface!

 

[Nothinman]

There's seriously something wrong with the threading in Chrome though, I think it may have a single thread for networking because downloading something definitely impacts all of the tabs.

 

[VinDSL]

There's seriously something wrong with the threading in Chrome though, I think it may have a single thread for networking because downloading something definitely impacts all of the tabs.

Yeah, it's a work-in-progress, for sure!

Try loading 60-70 tabs at a time (I do this routinely). Chrome slows to a crawl (along with my HDD 'idiot light' lit-up solid).

Personally, I think this is a RAM issue (or lack thereof). Chrome opens every tab in a new instance (for crash protection), and this takes a LOT of memory! If I keep the tab count down in the 30-ish range, it works okay. 50 tabs (and above) is pushing it. Depends on the complexity of the page...

As an aside (and to a lesser degree) when you're loading tabs with Flash content, I've noticed that Flash shifts the action to whichever tab is focused. That is, the tab you're viewing is getting all the action. The other tabs basically go dormant. I think this is a function of Flash scripting, not the browser, e.g. all browsers will do this.

When I'm coding in AJAX, for instance, 'focus' so called becomes very important, especially in a shared (server) environment. If you don't limit the focus attributes, it would be very easy to bring a web server to its knees. Heh! Especially with idiots like me loading multiple tabs at the same time.

I hate Google (although AdSense has been very good to me)! I'm sorry they make such a great browser. But, the fact of matter is...

I haven't run across anything that hustles like Chrome!

I'm sure they'll fix all the nags, in time.

I'd be happy if they would get mplayer working, instead of blacklisting it. That's my main bitch, with their Linux implementation -- and the only reason I'm keeping Firefox around... :|

 

[Ken g6]

Chrome has gotten so much better since I first downloaded it, it's unbelievable! First it added adblock, then scripts, then Stylish support came up to match Firefox.

If I can get this Shoyu RSS feed reader working, I may leave Firefox entirely!

 

[Nothinman]

Chrome opens every tab in a new instance (for crash protection), and this takes a LOT of memory!

It should take about the same amount as a single-process model, it just seems worse cause you have more visibility into it.

 

[VinDSL]

TRUE CONFESSIONS

I discovered something interesting, the other night, while playing around with my Conky config!

My /swap partition was turned off. So, I turned it on...

The next morning I fired up my desktop, and I noticed my /swap was turned off again. Hello?!?!?!?

I checked FSTAB and it contained some comments about /swap being on during installation, blah, blah, blah.

Soooo, I ran MountManager (yeah, I'm lazy), let it build a new FSTAB, and all was good.

A few hours later, I was using my ASUS EeePC netbook, and guess what?!?!? Same problem! :\

For some reason, MountManager wouldn't work on my EeePC. MM (in debug) was getting a segfault.

I wasn't interested in rewriting MountManager, so I switched to PySDM and fixed the /swap on my netty.

This made a bit of a difference, all the way around. Nothing earthshaking, but it DID add some wiggle-room to my system(s). I opened Chrome and both Firefox browsers, and loaded them with Flash games. I managed to use all my RAM, all my /swap, and max-out my CPUs in quick order, so it wasn't a cure-all!

This makes me wonder...

How many other ppl *think* they have a /swap partition running, but it isn't activated (due to a kernel update, or whatever caused FSTAB to mess up)? :awe:

If you're running a /swap partition, you might want to check its status...

 

[Kirby]

TRUE CONFESSIONS

*snip*

If you're running a /swap partition, you might want to check its status...

I don't think I've used my swap since I've had my laptop (Win7 and currently Mint 9), but it would seriously bug the hell out of me if it got turned off.

Vin, do you have a screenshot of your conky running? I've been meaning to set it up but just haven't been able to find the time.

 

[Nothinman]

Swap doesn't just turn itself off and you need root access to do that, so it's more likely that it was always like that or you turned it off and forgot.

 

[VinDSL]

Vin, do you have a screenshot of your conky running? I've been meaning to set it up but just haven't been able to find the time.

Here's the Conky I'm working on now (swapon)...

Here's an old example of Conky on my EeePC (swapoff)...

 

[VinDSL]

Swap doesn't just turn itself off[...]

True!

[...]and you need root access to do that[...]

True, again!

[...]so it's more likely that it was always like that or you turned it off and forgot.[...]

FAIL! :awe:

FSTAB was (effectively) turning off the /swap partition at boot...

I deleted the old FSTAB on this machine, but I think I saved it on the netty. I'll look for it later.

Doing a little forensics (judging by the comments in fstab) it *appears* that an update/upgrade script discovered an active /swap -- turned it off -- did it's thing - and set it to reactivate /swap at the next boot. I *assume* this took place during a major update/upgrade that required a restart.

The problem is, it *apparently* messed up the UUID of the /swap partition, so FSTAB couldn't find the /swap partition. Thus, /swap was not being activated during subsequent boot-ups.

Building new FSTABs fixed the problem on both machines, so *that* was definitely the culprit.

I would *guess* that many ppl have this problem, unless they've spotted it in Conky, System Monitor, or some other utility... :hmm:


EDIT1


Here's the old FSTAB on my netty...

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'vol_id --uuid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=a3e6228e-fa08-4cc8-865c-d73d1a462142 /             ext3    relatime,errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /home was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=e856f043-fb3a-402a-b05a-4732a3200c76 /home         ext3    relatime        0       2
# swap was on /dev/sda7 during installation
UUID=fd88e82a-0ac4-4e1f-aa23-84ff701b44e6 none          swap    sw              0       0

Here's the working FSTAB...

proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
UUID=a3e6228e-fa08-4cc8-865c-d73d1a462142 / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
UUID=e856f043-fb3a-402a-b05a-4732a3200c76 /home ext3 relatime 0 2
UUID=ebee0cdf-ef76-485a-af4c-3cf466714749 none swap sw 0 0

As you can see, the /swap partition UUIDs are different -- and it was nothing I did... ^_^

My question is: "[...]during installation" of what?!?!?!?

I'll watch for this, in future updates/upgrades, and see if I can determine what's causing it.


EDIT2


Thought I should toss this in too; least you think I changed the /swap location...

 

[SickBeast]

Firefox has a way lower memory footprint than Chrome, and is better for people with 512mb of ram or less. This is even more true with a bunch of tabs open.

Chrome also doesn't let you adjust the mouse wheel scroll rate without installing a bloated plugin that forces you to use smooth scrolling.

IMO Firefox > Chrome

 

[VinDSL]

Firefox has a way lower memory footprint than Chrome, and is better for people with 512mb of ram or less. This is even more true with a bunch of tabs open.[...]

For the sake of discussion...

I don't know what version of Fx you're running, but...

I've been running Firefox 3.6.8pre & 4.0b1 exclusively today.

I'm playing streaming audio in the background via Fx 3 -- and surfing with Fx4.

Memory use is rather miserly on both, right now, but when I play Flash games on Facebook, the memory (and CPU) usage goes off the scale, just like Chrome. Flash is the culprit here, not the choice of browser. However, Firefox becomes intolerably slow and unresponsive. Chrome retains its functionality and speed.

EDIT

I just restarted this machine, brought up all 3 browsers, and surfed to Google Search (probably a best case scenario).

I tallied the score:

• Fx 3.6.8pre = 34.4 MiB
• Fx 4.0b1 = 39.4 MiB
• Chrome 5.0.375.99 = 140.1 MiB

With 10 tabs open:

• Didn't test 3.6.8pre. I'm using it to type this.
• Fx 4.0b1 = 53.9 MiB
• Chrome 5.0.375.99 = 300.9 MiB

So, it would appear that you're right...

Once again, I'm NOT a Google fanboi. My hope is that Firefox (ultimately) rules, and Chrome drools, but the fact of the matter is... it's no-contest in the speed department!

On another note, I'm thinking about dumping Firefox 4. This thing is just too buggy for me.

LoL! And, yes, I know... That's what I get for running a rough beta! :sneaky:

My biggest complaints are:

1. I keep getting a warning dialog, every time I shut this machine down -- if, I've been running Fx4. For some reason, firefox-bin doesn't stop, when you close it down. It walks, talks, and quacks like a memory leak.
   
   
2. When I open multiple tabs, clicking links with the wheel button, it loses about 1-in-4. The tab doesn't open, the content is lost, but the link is flagged as visited. This is a real PITA, and costing me (game) points and coinage. As far as the Flash game is concerned, you collected your booty, and it doesn't let you click links twice.
   
   
3. Also, Mozilla hasn't issued a daily since June 30th. Either that, or their repo isn't getting updated.

3.6.8pre has been working pretty good - no major bugginess! So, I'll keep that around.

 

[Nothinman]

I'll watch for this, in future updates/upgrades, and see if I can determine what's causing it.

It shouldn't be too difficult to search through the post/pre-inst scripts to figure out which ones run swapoff and edit /etc/fstab.

So, it would appear that you're right...

Where did you get those numbers? There's no way that Chrome takes 4x the amount of memory as FF to display the same page. According to the Chromium task manager a tab to display Google is ~37M here.

 

[SickBeast]

Google any review comparing firefox to chrome and you will see that with many tabs open, firefox uses less memory on an order of magnitude of 3-4x.

 

[GTSRguy]

I dont think i liked Chrome when i came out, i hadn't tried it i just didnt like it for some reason. but ive found myself using it as a primary browser. I dont know much about browsers, but i know that Chrome feels very lightweight. Safari is a good browser but it slow and on my computer takes way to long to load, i have no patience.

I dont have any browsers that are error free though...chrome crashes certain plugins alot and occasionally crashes altogether but then its quick to boot back up and restore tabs.

 

[Nothinman]

Google any review comparing firefox to chrome and you will see that with many tabs open, firefox uses less memory on an order of magnitude of 3-4x.

I wouldn't trust anyone doing a web review to fully understand memory management and would find that large of a difference in memory usage to be extremely suspicious.

 

[SickBeast]

I wouldn't trust anyone doing a web review to fully understand memory management and would find that large of a difference in memory usage to be extremely suspicious.

I will tell you that on my own system, Chrome and Opera are unusable with 10+ tabs open, whereas with Firefox I can have 20-30 tabs open and things still run smoothly. I have 512mb of ram and run Lubuntu, which consumes 80mb of ram at startup.

 

[Nothinman]

I will tell you that on my own system, Chrome and Opera are unusable with 10+ tabs open, whereas with Firefox I can have 20-30 tabs open and things still run smoothly. I have 512mb of ram and run Lubuntu, which consumes 80mb of ram at startup.

I'm working on a much beefier machine right now but I've never seen that happen. I've got just under 20 tabs across 3 windows right now and it's fine. I probably have more at home on a weaker machine. Occasionally I'll have a tab consume a lot of memory after leaving it open for days and I'll have to kill it and refresh, but that's just odd things like Facebook.

My only real issue with Chromium is that it seems to only have a single network thread so there's a network bottleneck there. I haven't had time to look at the source to confirm that, it's just the feeling I get from using it.

 

[SickBeast]

I'm working on a much beefier machine right now but I've never seen that happen. I've got just under 20 tabs across 3 windows right now and it's fine. I probably have more at home on a weaker machine. Occasionally I'll have a tab consume a lot of memory after leaving it open for days and I'll have to kill it and refresh, but that's just odd things like Facebook.

My only real issue with Chromium is that it seems to only have a single network thread so there's a network bottleneck there. I haven't had time to look at the source to confirm that, it's just the feeling I get from using it.

On a beefier machine, I'm sure that Chromium is just fine. The wheel scrolling still bugs the hell out of me though, plus Firefox has a better zoom plugin.

 

[Nothinman]

On a beefier machine, I'm sure that Chromium is just fine. The wheel scrolling still bugs the hell out of me though, plus Firefox has a better zoom plugin.

The scrolling annoys me a bit, but I like the overall feel better than FF so I just deal with it.

But the fact that Opera has problems on your PC too seems to indicate that something else is going on because Opera has always been regarded as pretty lightweight, unless things have changed with it recently.

 

[VinDSL]

Where did you get those numbers? There's no way that Chrome takes 4x the amount of memory as FF to display the same page. According to the Chromium task manager a tab to display Google is ~37M here.

• I restarted Ubu.
• Opened all 3 browsers.
• Navigated to Google Search (blank forms - no results).
• Used 'System Monitor' to show usage.
• Manually added the figures with a calc.

I cannot remember the argument ppl used, back in the olden days, in defence of Firefox's excessive memory usage. But, I'm sure you'll tell me...

I know this isn't a particularly accurate method, but it's a quick n' dirty indicator of which browser has a smaller footprint.

Here's a snappy of the current usage...

Chrome has 2 tabs open - Anandtech & Facebook.

Firefox has 1 tab open - streaming audio feed.

EDIT

Hrm...

I was looking at that top line item in 'System Monitor'.

It reads 259.9 MiB and looked like a compilation of the rest of the figures -- judging by the ID & Waiting State -- so I added the other line items together, independently of that figure.

They come out to 281.3 MiB -- which is striking similar to the figure on the top line item.

Let me know what methodology you recommend, Nothinman, and I'll run my quasi-experiment again...

 

[VinDSL]

The scrolling annoys me a bit, but I like the overall feel better than FF so I just deal with it.[...]

You've crystallised my thoughts exactly!

Speed and functionality trump memory usage, IMHO.

I have a doorstop sitting at my feet, with 192MB RAM. On that machine, I run SeaMonkey, sooo...

I suppose it's all relative.

 

[SickBeast]

The scrolling annoys me a bit, but I like the overall feel better than FF so I just deal with it.

But the fact that Opera has problems on your PC too seems to indicate that something else is going on because Opera has always been regarded as pretty lightweight, unless things have changed with it recently.

Opera 10.60 certainly does not feel "light" to me with several tabs open. With just 1 or 2 it's ok. They rewrote the rendering engine for the latest version.

 

[Nothinman]

Manually added the figures with a calc.

That won't work because any process fork'd from another automatically shares most of it's resources, most memory is only copied local to that process' address space when it's modified. I have no idea if that "Memory" column is resident set size, total amount of virtual memory that's been allocated, shared memory, etc. Does top give the same numbers?

According to top my largest chromium process here is ~139M RSS. And the task manager in chromium lists the largest as ~130M so they're close. The discrepancy there is probably just shared components and the like.

I cannot remember the argument ppl used, back in the olden days, in defence of Firefox's excessive memory usage. But, I'm sure you'll tell me...

FF's memory usage has had issues over the years but overall it's never seemed too excessive to me. It was always comparable to other browsers from what I've seen. Some plugins like Flash and Java can cause problems, but that's not FF's fault. Install FlashBlock and ignore Java and you should be fine.

Let me know what methodology you recommend, Nothinman, and I'll run my quasi-experiment again...

People have been fighting with proper memory accounting for years or even decades, it's not an easily solvable problem given how virtual memory works. Most people end up just saying "Eh, close enough" and move on.