
Firefox 15 available to download, finally fixes add-on memory leak - mrsebastian
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/135156-firefox-15-available-to-download-finally-fixes-add-on-memory-leak
======
homosaur
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.

~~~
shardling
>The existence and popularity of Chrome has turned FF from a decrepit
bloatware to a sleek modern web racehorse.

Please don't spout this crap. Firefox has definitely improved a lot in some
areas recently, and I'm sure competition helped, but this idea that it was
getting _worse_ before chrome is an artifact of websites getting more
complicated.

Try to browse gmail or facebook with firefox 1.0 and it won't feel as slim or
fast as you remember...

~~~
NPC82
Well it's a little bit of both so I think he has every reason to also
attribute competition. Firefox has definitely borrowed a few ideas and
motivation from Chrome, and vice versa.

------
technojunkie
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!

~~~
pilif
By just starting Firefox and looking at the memory consumption, you are
measuring exactly that: Consumption. Not leakage.

Leaking implies a continuously increasing memory usage. By just opening,
measuring and closing again, you don't even get a chance to measure an
increase in consumption, so you can't say anything about leakage.

Also, 100MB for Firebug, Adblock and LastPass doesn't seem that far off -
especially Firebug is huge and has to do a lot of work, so I would expect that
to require quite a bit of memory.

~~~
technojunkie
Good point and I will continue to monitor the browser as I use it. Just in
initial browsing, I'm still finding the memory consumption increasing at the
same alarming rate it was before sadly. :( But you are correct that I need to
give it some time to really measure correctly.

That said, even with the 9 add-ons I'm using, I was hoping I could see a total
memory usage on startup to be closer to 225MB.

~~~
mtgx
Also having the lowest memory consumption is not always the best indicator for
how good a browser is. For example, I think Chrome uses more memory per tab
than most other browsers, because of its individual sandboxing system. But
that seems to be a pretty fair trade-off. Has Firefox started using sandboxing
yet?

~~~
technojunkie
Maybe you're right about lowest memory consumption, but what keeps me going
back to Chrome is consistency in good performance and the fact that I can
easily shut down one tab without having to restart the whole browser to reduce
memory if that ever happens.

All browsers do have memory leaks but the fact that FF's memory continually
increases to the point where I have to restart the whole browser every day is
mentally tiring. This is where Chrome just got it right.

~~~
robin_reala
_FF's memory continually increases to the point where I have to restart the
whole browser every day_

That’s really not the case any more.

~~~
ralfn
This was fixed for extension-free firefox. Today this is fixed, for extensions
as well.

What was happening was that extensions had references to dom-nodes of a page,
that prevented the page from being unloaded when you close the tab. Unless of
course, the extendion author bothered to fix this from their side. Now, an
extension has essentially "weak references" to dom nodes. (think: symlink)

------
UnoriginalGuy
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).

~~~
rufugee
I'd consider switching to Chrome if it weren't for the nightmarish way it
expects you to manage tabs. I typically have 30 or so tabs open at any given
time, and in Chrome that means a horizontal row of very tiny tabs with only
icons (no text...therefore no context) across the top. They used to have
sidebar capabilities (on Windows, which didn't help this Linux user) but for
some reason I can't fathom they removed them.

Contrast this with Firefox, where I can easily get a tab bar down the side via
a plugin (I use this: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-
style-ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)).
Even without a plugin, FF gives me the Expose-like functionality
(ctrl+shift+e) which will show me all open tabs _and_ their titles.

How Google can think the current tab situation in Chrome is useful is a
mystery to me.

~~~
deepGem
30 tabs ? really ? man, how do you keep your focus.

~~~
ralfn
Ill bet he just opens every link in a new tab and uses tabs as readme-later
list and navigation history. Both usecases are better served differently.

In general there is lots of overlap between
tabs/tabgroups/bookmarks/history/readmelater/systemtaskbar/sessionrecovery.

Most people need all use cases but pick one or two features and emulate the
rest themselves. Most tab related firefox plugins essentially duplicate
functionality already present on top of the tab system.

For example: hierarchical tabs on the left with tab recovery is identical to
having a bookmark list on the left.

It is my opinion that these concepts should all merge, preferbly at the
desktop shell level. Ubuntu is movng is this direction, but they add this
functionality on top of all the existing functionality. We can only hope that
they will in the future consolidate all the overlap.

~~~
hackmiester
I don't think tabs with tab recovery is always equivalent to a bookmark list.
Personally, I have 30-40 tabs open. This is because I have several projects I
work on, any of which I may research in 10 or more tabs. When I switch between
projects, I don't want to have to close all the tabs and reopen them. I don't
care if they are swapped out of memory, but the access should remain easy.
Having to manually bookmark these to come back to them isn't easy.

~~~
ralfn
I was not claiming the problem exist with the user.

Im claiming there is lots of overlap in functionality. The differences are in
the default behavior and the UI elements. In the end, it should all be one big
directed graph.

I would rather state it the other way around. The fact that people use tabs,
means the bookmark functionality is broken from a UX perspective.

------
mccr8
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-...](http://blog.kylehuey.com/post/21892343371/fixing-the-memory-leak)

------
darklajid
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...](http://code.google.com/p/dactyl/source/detail?r=2557fa60103046ebfeaee1eb4f3e1377cdd6366f)

Really don't want to miss that addon anymore.

~~~
jvm
This made me switch back to Vimperator and I haven't looked back.

~~~
w1ntermute
How is Vimperator these days? Is it comparable to Pentadactyl? I remember
switching because of some deficiency, but I don't remember exactly what.

~~~
xyzzyb
It is absolutely comparable to Pentadactyl. I switched from Chrome to
pentadactyl and then to vimperator after getting fed up with all the bugs.

<http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Pentadactyl_vs_Vimperator>

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

~~~
mtgx
It's the same as Chrome's - 6 weeks. What I think made a lot of people before
attack Mozilla for it was because: 1) the "Firefox user" wasn't used to this
kind of fast updates, the way the "Chrome user" was - and 2) Firefox' updates
were not silent, and therefore you _knew_ you got an update and some users may
have been getting annoyed _having to update it_ so often, instead of silently
upgrading in the background. But apparently they now have silent upgrades
starting with this version.

~~~
jarrettcoggin
This is one of the biggest problems to tackle when updating software: How can
the user be uninterrupted? This is one of the biggest problems I have on my
WP7. My apps stay out of date for a long time until I manually go update them.
I don't think to manually update them very often (maybe once a month). I'd
much rather the app be updated silently in the background, and when I re-open
it after the updates have been downloaded/applied, I then notice that things
have changed.

This is pretty much the same way websites operate and you don't have much
control over it. You may be able to prolong the update while they are "beta"
testing it (a la Google/Facebook), but eventually you get the update and have
to deal with it.

~~~
omaranto
I like silent updates when they're not likely to be huge user-visible
improvements, mostly performance enhancements and bug fixes. In the case of
Firefox or Chrome, for example, I'm perfectly happy with the current feature
set and just want them to keep getting faster and more stable. On the other
hand, most of the Android apps I use are missing a couple of functions or have
some annoying visisble bug I am waiting to be fixed. Then I prefer updates to
be automatic but _not_ silent so I can read the change list and if something I
am waiting for has been added or fixed I know (and rejoice) right away.

------
lmm
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.

~~~
cpeterso
I think the press (overly) publicized the add-on leak fix as it progressed
through Firefox's 6-week release pipeline (Nightly -> Aurora -> Beta ->
Release).

~~~
ward
This is the case, this particular news has been reported and HN frontpaged
when it came in Aurora and when it came in Beta, iirc.

------
o_rally
> 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

~~~
robin_reala
What’s time-consuming, technical and inaccessible to normal people is updating
their software. No-one in my family bothers apart from the people who actually
work in the software industry. This isn’t necessarily a problem when it comes
to features (apart from version fragmentation) but it’s a nightmare when it
comes to security. The more silent and automatic security updates the better
for them.

~~~
o_rally
I disagree. There is a difference between not knowing what to do, or how to do
it, versus simply not doing it out of laziness or negligence or an
unwillingness to take on the responsibilities implicit in owning your own
device.

The learning curve for keeping software up-to-date is not particularly steep.

~~~
masklinn
> I disagree.

You can disagree all you want, objective reality does not care.

> There is a difference between [stuff]

When the end result is that the vast majority of your users don't update their
software, there isn't.

> The learning curve for keeping software up-to-date is not particularly
> steep.

Which is irrelevant, the vast majority does not care, has no incentive to care
and can't be arsed to care. You won't make them care by caring more yourself
_they do not want to know about such technical details_.

The Mozilla team did not build mandatory auto-update because they found it
fun, they did it because _people don't update their software_ and scary popups
are just that: scary popups.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
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.

~~~
kuida0r3
Here's tech demo!

[https://developer.mozilla.org/media/uploads/demos/a/z/azakai...](https://developer.mozilla.org/media/uploads/demos/a/z/azakai/3baf4ad7e600cbda06ec46efec5ec3b8/bananabread_1346106841_demo_package/game.html?low,low)

~~~
Camillo
Nice! But what are the security implications of giving web pages access to the
GPU?

------
ralfn
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.

~~~
bjacob
As someone working on Mozilla's WebGL implementation, I assure you that WebGL
is not just about passing OpenGL calls "unfiltered" to the driver. In fact, an
implementation doing that could not even pass the standard WebGL conformance
tests.

------
isaacaggrey
Release Notes: <https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/15.0/releasenotes/>

------
CodeMage
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.

------
polshaw
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?

~~~
tomku
The Chromium package in Ubuntu is several major versions behind, and I would
definitely not suggest using it. Debian has up-to-date versions in sid.
Firefox on Ubuntu gets timely (within a couple days of upstream) updates, and
the official Chrome PPA (from Google, installed when you use their .deb
package) is kept up to date.

Edited for correctness, thanks xfs.

~~~
xfs
"effectively unmaintained"? It has 21 updates till now in this year, probably
just one release behind chromium stable channel.
[http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/c/chromium-b...](http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/c/chromium-
browser/current/changelog)

Of course you need sid, because of too many bugs.

~~~
tomku
I'll edit my post, you're absolutely right.

------
ck2
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?

~~~
melling
Why does it seem insane? "Release early, release often" has been around for
years. Both Chrome and Firefox both update every six weeks. That means over
half of the Internet is now upgrading at a nice clip.

[http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-
daily-20120828-2012082...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-
daily-20120828-20120828-bar)

The big question is how to get more people on a 6 week cycle.

~~~
ck2
Because the major version number is now the minor version.

In theory we should be on Firefox 9.15 or something.

Now big number changes mean small improvements.

~~~
AndrewDucker
No, big number changes mean that six weeks have passed. That's all. The scale
of the change doesn't affect the number at all.

~~~
Karunamon
Which is kind of the problem. The standard way of doing it is major
release.minor release.build

If it wasn't for this whole "Let's start bumping our version number to match
Chrome's insanity" thing, we'd still be on Firefox 9 something.

~~~
joedrew
It has nothing to do with Chrome, and everything to do with 6-weekly updates.

Think of it: You have no way to know, going in, whether the changes in any
given update will be big enough to "warrant" a major version change. Worse,
what if those features aren't stable enough to release and are turned off?
It's very difficult to go from version N to version (N-1).

For these reasons (and others), it's a lot easier for us to unconditionally
bump the major version every 6 weeks.

Source: I am a Firefox developer and a Mozilla employee.

------
specto
[http://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/rele...](http://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/15.0/mac/en-
US/Firefox%2015.0.dmg)

[http://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/rele...](http://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/15.0/win32/en-
US/Firefox%20Setup%2015.0.exe)

Direct links to the OS X version and win32 version.

------
sswezey
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.

------
DigitalSea
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.

~~~
nnethercote
Please give FF15 a try. We've made lots of improvements. See
<https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink> and
<https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memshrink/> for details.

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

~~~
azakai
The press tends to jump the gun a little, because each blog and news site
wants to be "first".

The actual launch is planned for sometime today.

~~~
mscrivo
me too, and the new downloads panel is still not in this build, I wonder what
the hold up is.

~~~
asadotzler
The hold up is that the person working on this has higher priorities. It is
progressing. If you want to use it, move to the nightly channel.

------
Xyzodiac
And it breaks pentadactyl, I feel entirely helpless.

~~~
xyzzyb
Give Vimperator a shot. I found it to be 100% compatible with my usage of
Pentadactyl (bmark bookmarklets, etc.) and it's working just fine with FF15.

~~~
danneu
Didn't know Vimp was the common ancestor. Copied my .pentadactylrc into
.vimperatorrc and most of it works.

------
veidr
_Finally_.

------
lhnn
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.

~~~
dangoor
Actually, I think the effect is better this way: changes are relatively small
and incremental (and every release does not have significant user-visible
change). This is easier than a huge change all at once (like Firefox
3.6->Firefox 4)

------
webwanderings
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.

~~~
josteink
When you chose to stay on a decade old OS, 3 major revisions behind what is
currently out there, you sort of chose what sort of support you were going to
get.

 _Nobody is supporting Ubuntu 6, yet you seem to expect people to support the
Windows equivalent._

I know XPers refuse to admit it, but they run an antiquated OS, and if you
insist on running antiquated operating system software, don't be surprised
when the rest of the software you can run starts rusting as well.

Sorry.

~~~
webwanderings
Can you give me one legitimate reason to move off of this OS when 99% of my
use of this OS is only through the browser?

I made my hardware compatible by upgrading the memory to the max and my
computer (browser in fact) runs as good as any Windows 7 or anything else
"new" out there.

I simply see these OS upgrades as marketing ploy to generate more income
(nothing wrong with that but I have to have my choices too).

People are simply being suckered in to buying newer hardware which they don't
really need.

~~~
freehunter
Newer OS versions aren't just marketing ploy, they also include major security
features. This is very important if everything you do is in the browser. There
are a world of browser exploits that can compromise your system, and the
majority of them target Windows XP due to its security holes (some of which
cannot be patched without moving to 7 or 8).

You can continue to make your stand against Microsoft's evil plans, but saving
yourself $100 by not upgrading could end up costing you everything in your
bank account when you end up with a rootkit that steals your account
information.

