Firefox 15 Released: Silent Updates, Compressed Textures, Add-on Memory Leak Fix 393
Mozilla released Firefox 15 today, and it brings a number of interesting changes. First, the browser is finally switching to a "silent" update model, like Chrome. (No doubt in answer to endless complaints about their rapid release cycle.) In addition, Mozilla says they have "now plugged the main cause of memory leaks in Firefox add-ons." Add-ons commonly hold extra copies of sites in memory when they don't need to, and the browser now has a mechanism to detect this and reclaim the memory. Another significant improvement is the addition of native support for compressed textures in WebGL, which is a boost for high-res 3D gaming. Here are release notes for the desktop and mobile versions.
DOM inspector (Score:2)
Try this:
1. Right click on the Firefox start page (about:home) around the empty area left of the Firefox logo -> Inspect element.
2. <div id="topSection"> should be selected.
3. Open Tools -> Web Developer -> Web console.
4. Type: document.getElementById('topSection').className = 'hello';
5. Notice the view of the DOM below does not update to reflect the new className you've added.
Additionally, there doesn't seem to be a
Re:DOM inspector (Score:5, Funny)
They've got to save memory somehow, you know!
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This isn't a bug tracker (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, I mean you probably found a bug. The thing to do is to either post on the project mailing list or file a bug report.
Posting a comment on Slashdot is unlikely to result in a solution.
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Posting on Slashdot certainly wont. People have been complaining about memory leaks in Firefox for years and some of the devs have repeatedly come here and told us there aren't any.
Right, so why the fuck did they just fix one in this update?
Hopefully they're more helpful on the project mailing list/bug tracker like you suggest, but you're spot on about reporting it here being no use, as although they will see it, they'll just pretend it isn't a problem and that Firefox is flawless.
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Why not use Firebug?
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Flash freezing (Score:4, Interesting)
Did they fix Flash freezing all the time, or is that Adobe's fault?
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Did they fix Flash freezing all the time, or is that Adobe's fault?
It's Adobe. It's like Acrobat Reader, it freezes everything sometimes. That's life.
Re:Flash freezing (Score:5, Informative)
Flashblock fixes the problem with Flash freezing. If I could marry it, I would.
Re:Flash freezing (Score:5, Funny)
"Fixing" Flash properly is beyond the capability of mere mortals.
Re:Flash freezing (Score:5, Funny)
"Fixing" Flash properly is beyond the capability of mere mortals.
The only way to fix Flash is to not install it.
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That's an Adobe issue, though I haven't seen any problems with it since Flash 11.
Re:Flash freezing (Score:5, Insightful)
Did they fix Flash freezing all the time, or is that Adobe's fault?
Adobe fixed it by end-of-lifing Flash. Thanks Adobe.
SILENT updates? (Score:5, Insightful)
Last thing I need is for an idiot in some far and distant place to think it fun to roll out a new version and trigger an update on all my computers that may render all the corporate apps unusable. No, thank you. FF joins Chrome in the sandboxed "use only if indispensable" bin.
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Indeed. Automatic updates are already a very bad idea. Making them silent is the hight of stupidity.
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Chrome has been doing them since, like, forever. I think it's fantastic, personally. I dont want the browser to nag me when it's time to update. Just do it...
Re:SILENT updates? (Score:5, Insightful)
Until an update breaks something, and you don't even know Chrome is what updated.
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Re:SILENT updates? (Score:5, Insightful)
Chrome has been doing them since, like, forever. I think it's fantastic, personally. I dont want the browser to nag me when it's time to update. Just do it...
You probably also don't have 100 computer semi-literates using Chrome for mission critical applications that will all call you at the same time when those mission critical apps stop working.
Automatic updates are fine for people who don't care if the program stops working for some unexplained reason, or who can either debug the problem themselves or put off finding a solution until they have some free time. Or for people who make a living off of debugging other people's computer problems.
Automatic updates are dangerous for high reliability systems, mission critical applications, or anything that is supposed to run unattended. Anyone who has worked in IT for any length of time will have memories of when some program decided to update itself and made itself fail. (E.g., "Firefox has detected that the following plugins are incompatible with the current version and disabled them:")
Re:SILENT updates? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:SILENT updates? (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, turn it off?
If your managing multiple computers, PLEASE tell me you know how to turn these sorts of features off.
Re:SILENT updates? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are managing multiple computers, PLEASE tell me the end users do not have write access to the browser executables in the first place.
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ESR Releases (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/ [mozilla.org]
Re:SILENT updates? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a default, not a mandate. If it doesn't benefit you, like it benefits the vast majority of Firefox users, then turn it off, FFS.
Re:SILENT updates? (Score:5, Informative)
You know you can disable that on Chrome, right? It's not even complicated. Here is a guide [chromium.org] for the administrators.
I'm sure you can also disable it on Firefox as well.
There's no need to put them in the bin at all, at least not for that reason.
Re:SILENT updates? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The point is with something like IE you would be able to do it with your existing management tools (i.e. group policies).
If it's more complicated then it's not that an IT admin can't do it, but why should they do it when the tools that come bundled with the OS do it better?
If the FOSS community wants to beat Microsoft, it needs to do better than Microsoft, not worse. I've seen many shops stick to using the likes of IE for exactly this reason.
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Not only corporate. I have dedicated banking machine running Chrome (decision was made back when it was the only major browser using sand boxing) that is only used couple times a month. Silent updates majorly bog it down. Yes, if I cared enough I'd find a way to block it.
Can someone tell me what the difference between Firefox and Chrome these days? I want my supported 3.6 back.
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While I might not actively remember security benefit, I do remember inconvenience of waiting for it to update. Blame human psychology.
Decision process is following: Inconvenience of slow Chrome startups due to updating Vs. Inconvenience with disabling it and remembering to keep
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you could always use their extended release version that is supported for one year.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/
Re:SILENT updates? (Score:4, Informative)
Just turn them off. Same thing we do with Window Servers. Download updated but let me choose when to install them.
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/disable-silent-updates-in-firefox/ [bleepingcomputer.com]
Re:SILENT updates? (Score:4, Informative)
And that is why you should download and install the Firefox Extended Support Release: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all.html [mozilla.org] instead of their version-of-the-month.
Hopefully future ESR releases will remain able to manage updates.
Upgrades wipe out my login cookies! (Score:4, Insightful)
Works fine for me (Score:3)
I just updated Firefox between my "Flash freezing" post above and this post here, and I didn't have to log into Slashdot again.
Re:Works fine for me (Score:5, Informative)
GP said
Every time Firefox upgrades, it wipes out my login cookies. It forces me to re-login to my sites. Is there a way to turn this dictator off?
I would be very surprised if there were not. Chrome lets you turn it off. I'm sure if you use Iceweasel (the Debian Firefox derivative), this wouldn't be a problem (updates are managed by apt). There are third-party efforts like IceWeasel for Windows [sourceforge.net] and Porting Icecat on Mac Using Fink [sourceforge.net] (IceCat is the GNU port of Firefox, sharing quite a bit (even the name, originally) with Iceweasel), but they're horribly out of date.
You said
I just updated Firefox between my "Flash freezing" post above and this post here, and I didn't have to log into Slashdot again.
Slashdot works because its cookies do not expire with the session. Any cookies that expire with the session will be expired by a browser upgrade. This is because "resuming" a crashed or otherwise saved session isn't actually resuming, it is reopening to the browser's best ability. This does not include session cookies for security reasons.
Re:Upgrades wipe out my login cookies! (Score:4, Interesting)
Install Opera instead. There is a very small number of sites with problems, most work just fine.
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No doubt, you have "Clear history when Firefox closes" checked on the options Privacy tab.
Next... (Score:2)
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-already-running-not-responding [mozilla.org]
I don't take this as a solution:
If Firefox did not shut down normally when you last used it, Firefox might still be running in the background, even though it is not visible. Restart your computer to see if the problem goes away.
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Or kill it from the Task Manager.
Or wait until your disk drive light dies down...
Re:Next... (Score:5, Informative)
Why are you using WinRar when 7zip exists?
Re:Next... (Score:4)
Why are you using WinRar when 7zip exists?
Why anyone is still using the RAR format is beyond me.
Where is 64-bit version? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's been what, six years since 64-bit OSes became norm? Why can't Firefox devs make a 64-bit version?
32-bit Firefox runs like crap on Win7. I use this ajax grid [dhtmlx.com] in my pages, and it runs smooth as glass on XP. The same page viewed on Win7 Firefox is slow and jerky. There's something wrong with the way Firefox renders javascript when running under a 64-bit OS.
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What is wrong with that grid on your FF? It runs smoothly on my 64 bit Linux on Firefox.
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Re:Where is 64-bit version? (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest issue with the 64-bit versions is that they only run 64-bit plugins, unless you use something like nspluginwrapper (nspluginwrapper.org).
Re:Where is 64-bit version? (Score:4, Informative)
The biggest issue with the 64-bit versions is that they only run 64-bit plugins, unless you use something like nspluginwrapper (nspluginwrapper.org).
That is out of date information. The 64-bit builds (Waterfox & Pal Moon) are compatible with all standard 32-bit extensions.
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try disabling hardware acceleration on the preferences panel, if it works ok try to update your video drivers, I had problems with old buggy drivers on some pages
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That grid runs fine for me on 64-bit.
The demo only has a few lines. Once the grid gets to 50 lines or so, it gets very jerky while scrolling up and down on Win7. On XP it's very smooth even with a thousand lines.
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High Res 3D Gaming?? (Score:2)
In my browser?
Re:High Res 3D Gaming?? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh please no! High-res 3D "punch the monkey ads" :(
Brilliant!! (Score:4, Insightful)
the browser is finally switching to a "silent" update model, like Chrome. (No doubt in answer to endless complaints about their rapid release cycle.
So people have been complaining about Firefox's Rapid Release Cycle -- more correctly called Rapid Version Number Inflation -- and so Firefox's solution is to continue doing it and just not tell you about it.
Brilliant.
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more correctly called Rapid Version Number Inflation
More correctly called "Chrome does it so we have to do it too".
-- comment posted using Firefox 10.0.7ESR [mozilla.org]
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WebGL (Score:2)
So, does Firefox support WebGL on Linux yet?
Great (Score:2)
It broke my Exchange plugin in Thunderbird (manual update). No company calendar for me for an unspecified time frame.
The summary missed the real headline feature! (Score:5, Interesting)
The memory improvements are nice and all, but the support for the Opus audio codec [opus-codec.org] will have a much bigger impact on the Web. Opus is open source, royalty-free, and superior to previous formats in latency, flexibility, and audio quality. It handles speech, music, and general audio well, and scales fluidly from a 6kbps mono narrowband VOIP bandwidth all the way up to perceptually-transparent multichannel music. It's been approved as an IETF standard and should be published as an RFC this week.
Finally having a best-of-breed standardized codec which is universally implementable without patent royalties means that HTML5 audio - especially real-time communications - can finally take off.
Firefox is the second major end-user application to add support [mozilla.org]. (The first was the foobar2k audio player.)
Re:The summary missed the real headline feature! (Score:5, Insightful)
No codec rules the market forever. You might as well have been saying "dude, mp2 rules both audio and video, give it up" fifteen years ago, or "dude, audio is MP3 and video is DIVX and that is that" nine years ago.
The MPEG cartel doesn't believe you either; they've been rushing to get new codecs together (USAC/Extended HE-AAC, H.265).
This time they were beat to the punch. Opus significantly outperforms MP3 and AAC even at their strong points, and MP3 and AAC are very poor for low-bandwidth use and zero use for low-latency communications. USAC is late to the party, high-latency, and doesn't match Opus's quality.
Opus may not totally displace MP3 and AAC for music player use, but it will gain a place there, just as AAC did, and in many of the markets it competes in- especially low-latency Internet audio- there is no well-established competitor.
I Love Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
At the risk of killing my Slashdot cred: I love Firefox.
I have not noticed any memory leak problems, my 15+ Add-Ons have not broken with FF updates, I do not care what version they call it (major or minor number updates) and I can not remember when it last crashed on me.
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Are you an IE 6 user as well?
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Mozilla says they have "now plugged the main cause of memory leaks in Firefox add-ons."
Er, the same memory leaks they assured us weren't happening or weren't their fault?
I have to give them credit. The Firefox devs have quite a sense of humor.
I remember when they claimed that Firefox's excessive memory usage was a feature not a bug -- i.e., Firefox was caching pages. Which is really great except that it wasn't true.
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I have to give them credit. The Firefox devs have quite a sense of humor.
I remember when they claimed that Firefox's excessive memory usage was a feature not a bug -- i.e., Firefox was caching pages. Which is really great except that it wasn't true.
I remember that. It actually was all true, and not as you describe. They never said that the memory usage was "a feature, not a bug". That would be daft. They said that the enormous memory usage of one particular version wasn't caused by a memory leak as many suspected (there were several known ones at that stage, but this wasn't one of them), but rather that it was caused by a new feature that was added to that version and removed from the next (hey, let's use all the free memory as a cache pool! when apps
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Mozilla says they have "now plugged the main cause of memory leaks in Firefox add-ons."
Er, the same memory leaks they assured us weren't happening or weren't their fault?
I just RTFA so I'll answer that for you: "weren't their fault". In TFA they say the memory leaks aren't Mozilla's fault, but it is their problem. The plugins create the memory leaks and there's not much Mozilla can do about that. They've tried working with lots of plugin writers to clean it up and they've got them to make progress, but they can't force every developer to cooperate, and they can't force those that do cooperate to fix it 100%. So instead, they've figured out a way to forcefull rip the memory
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In a sense, yes, they are fixing problems that weren't their fault. 3rd-party add-ons have been the cause of the most significant FF memory problems for many users, and FF 15 contains changes which should keep even badly written add-ons from leaking anywhere near as much memory as they used to.
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Re:Old story, or something new? (Score:4, Interesting)
I leave Firefox windows with dozens of tabs open for weeks and even months at a time, and haven't noticed any stability issues in a year or so...But I also don't use any add-ons except Firebug.
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I leave Firefox windows with dozens of tabs open for weeks and even months at a time, and haven't noticed any stability issues in a year or so...But I also don't use any add-ons except Firebug.
You are luck. I use Firefox with firebug for webdevelopment, and although I love it, I have to restart it a couple of times daily, as Firefox easily goes to 1.6GB of memory easy. And that is with 1 window open and about 10-15 tabs only. It is very much dependent on what you are using on the tab that has firebug. Let me give you an example: I'm now developing on top of JS table\tree framework, which tends to have a lot on memory. If firebug is open it starts keeping copies of a bunch of versions of this JS p
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Please don't tell me you are running windows with 2Gb or some low amount like that.
A development box needs tons of ram. Sounds you are in desperate need for a 64 bit system as well.
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Re:Old story, or something new? (Score:5, Funny)
mail me the 1000 bucks for a new laptop asshole
Your laptop has an asshole?
What's wrong with it?
Re:Old story, or something new? (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like it has a case of memoroids!
Re:Old story, or something new? (Score:4, Funny)
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Some people have a laptop asshole and some have one on the bottom.
Thus the desire to get to the bottom of things.
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Who's out of touch? I bought a brand-new laptop two years ago with 4GB of RAM for just over $600, and it was only that much because I wanted a decent video card in it.
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If your laptop can't handle more than 2 GB of RAM, it is so old that any $300 notebook that can handle 8 GB or more of RAM (and probably comes with 4 GB) will outperform it in every performance metric. And I just got 8 GB of low voltage DDR3-1600 cas 9 SO-DIMMS from newegg for $48. And if your DEVELOPMENT box isn't making you enough money to justify spending either of those two numbers, get out of the development business, because it should easily be paying for something 4x more expensive.
If you aren't d
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My daily-use laptop has a 1.83GHz Pentium-M with a couple of megs of cache. It only supports 2GB of DDR2. It's got a modem (that I do actually use from time to time), 802.11a/b/g, and a 1920x1200 display, integrated Bluetooth, and a video card that does just fine with whatever I throw at it.
So I went looking at walmart.com, home of the modern cheap-shit namebrand computer. They have a $298 Compaq with an AMD E300 which is only just marginally faster with its two cores (the old single-core Pentium-M will
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Old story, or something new? (Score:5, Interesting)
What you describe is solely due to Firebug, and it's kind of a side-effect of it's features, not truely a bug that should be resolved.
I would recommend you simply run 2 firefox sessions.
Setup firefox with 2 profiles
- keep the Default profile for your regular browsing, enable day-to-day addons like adblock, pretty theme, no firebug)
- Create a development profile, enable firebug and the like, different homepage, no adblock etc, firebug enabled
Alter the Shortcut(s) on your desktop so you have 2 firefox shortcuts, one starting with the default profile /-P default/, and the other one automatically using the developer profile (also use the no-remote commandline switch for this one).
Now you simply have 2 firefox sessions, the developer one has a seperate (boring) theme so its easy to recognise and you can reboot it whenever you feel like it. The default profile has your regular browsing tabs and you can leave this running for months (i do, never any probs). Whenever you click a hyperlink in an external application they will all open in your regular browsing session (even if that firefox wasnt running yet) due to the no-remote flag on the developer shortcut.
It might take you a few days to get used to doing your developing in the seperate browsing session, but you'll be used to it after that and you'll love it. I do web development myself aswell and use a similar setup. Some additional benefits:
- I love adblock/noscript/etc for regular browsing sessions, and now that my development is done in a seperate session (without those addons) i no longer have those weird situations where i add stuff to a site i'm working on and it doesnt show due to being adblocked.
- If you manage to do really wicked shit during development and cause a race condition or browser crash or the like (not likely for regular HTML/JS stuff, but start messing with native client, vrml, plugins or other less common parts and it can happen), your regular browsing session doesn't get affected.
- My regular profile has Google as homepage, my development profile has my current project as homepage
- I spend a lot of time everyday inside my browser (like most ppl here), so i like to tweak every little thing to my taste, having seperate profiles means my development profile can remain mostly "factory default" eliminating the chance that some weird shit i did to firefox is having an effect on the page im developing.
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Yes, exactly! The high memory usage comes from firebug. If you really have so little memory, then you'll be much better off running 2 separate instances of Firefox. In both my own testing and Tom's latest browser Firefox turn out on top with the lowest memory footprint.
http://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/memoryusage3wbgp11,0101-343668-0-2-3-1-png-.html [tomshardware.com]
Best 40 tab - Firefox 794 MB
Worst 40 tab - Chrome 1449 MB
Chrome used almost twice the memory as Firefox.
Re:Old story, or something new? (Score:5, Informative)
I do. Daily. 100+ tabs open is not uncommon. Firefox hasn't crashed for years. The rest of your comment is OffTopic.
Re:Old story, or something new? (Score:5, Informative)
Crash? No. Come to a complete stop for 10 seconds while doing nothing more but scrolling? Yes.
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Re:Old story, or something new? (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. Open a lot of windows and tabs and see for yourself. Maybe you don't normally do that, but people who do research online often see Firefox instability.
At the moment it's a tie between Firefox and Chrome on that front. I normally run both Firefox and Chrome because both of them will die after some number of days of heavy tab usage (100+ tabs). Chrome has this nasty, nasty habit of forgetting your previously open tabs with no way to recover them, if for some reason it crashes again before you hit the recover button. Which is pretty common actually, for example if you reboot a couple of times. (Embarassing bug! What's up with you smart people who totally own the Chrome project?) Furthermore, if you accidentally hit the "start" button instead of "recover" it's not game over for your Firefox tabs, you can get them back just by renaming a file, or you can archive those tabs just by copying that file if you want. If there's any way to do this in Chrome, I haven't found it. For these reasons, and also Chrome's annoying insistance on forcing you to save content to disk before opening it, Firefox is my primary browser for real work and Chrome is my throwaway browser.
Re:Old story, or something new? (Score:5, Informative)
Having run into memory problems repeatedly for years, Firefox 15 is shockingly better at memory management. They completely change the model they used to help clean up after add-ons that don't clean up after themselves and very few of them have had to be fixed to work with it. Memory usage for me has been cut by more than half.
Mozilla also went out of its way to make the updater service run with as few rights as possible [mozilla.org] with code that revokes rights that it does not need. There were about three dozen permissions explicitly dropped when it was first developed around FF12. That number may have changed slightly but it's still a long list.
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Nonsense. I open literally dozens of Firefox windows with no instability at all.
Unless high memory usage is a problem in your system.
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My experience with FF is even worse than yours. I could get painful slowdowns just using the browser, without multiple windows, for an hour or two. The Windows task manager shows it using over a gigabyte. The blame has to belong to one of my plugins, but which one? I've tried selective disabling, with no luck.
I gave up on FF a few months ago. I'd resisted the move to Chrome for years (not enough plugins, too much GUI cleverness) but the aggravation of repeated slowdowns, freezes, and crashes was finally too
Tab Mix Plus makes multi-row tabs. (Score:3)
Try the Tab Mix Plus [mozilla.org] extension. Choose this setting:
Tab Mix Plus > Options > Display > Tab Bar > When tabs don't fit width > Multi-row
The reason Firefox is ultra important to human development at present is that it has so many excellent extensions.
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In my experience that's pretty ALWAYS Flash. Make sure yours is updated, as I haven't had many problems with that on recent versions, and maybe try Flashblock or something. Whatever they fixed might help as well, I don't really know.
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ah crap, started with 'pretty much always Flash', then thought about it and realized it was 'ALWAYS Flash'...and ended up with 'pretty ALWAYS Flash'...my bad.