Firefox 29 is out...

[Cody]

Be a little wary - they've gone and changed a few things. It's easier to crosslink for info, plus useful addons to restore the older appearance.

[Diziet Sma]

Yeah.. some of the changes I like, but others...

Very unimpressed that they seem to have killed off the addons bar. I had a lot of useful stuff displayed there, now they're all buried in the drop-down menu of the upper toolbar, and one or two of my addons seem to have disappeared altogether, even though they're showing as still installed.

[CommRLock78]

Interestingly I had hesitated to do the system upgrade today because of the Firefox update. I had no idea that they had changed things so radically. My hesitation came from the general feelings I have of late about Firefox: it just seems to get more and more bloated. Granted, I do typically have about 10 windows open, but I don't think that's reason for Firefox to take nearly a GB of memory... .

I might just have to find a new browser at this rate.

[Diziet Sma]

Heh.. I typically have anywhere from 20-50 or more tabs open at any given time.. but I've discovered something interesting about this version of FF. Normally FF will use around 60% or so of the 3GB in my laptop. It might go up a bit during a heavy session.

But now, memory usage gradually increases over a couple of hours until all RAM is in use.. at which point things freeze up for 10-15 seconds, then about 1/3 of my RAM is freed up, and things run smoothly again. This has happened 3 times now over the past 8 hours or so. Very strange.

(oh yeah.. the cosmetic changes can be switched back, if you like.. all the new looks and features can be individually enabled or disabled if you want. It just takes a bit of searching with the FF help system to find the articles)

[Cody]

Hmm... interesting. I figured that the cosmetic changes would probably be reversible, so I'll enjoy working all that out later (when I actually update my FF). Curious thing about the RAM usage, Diz... I rarely have more than half a dozen tabs open, so have not seen anything like that.

[CommRLock78]

Heh.. I typically have anywhere from 20-50 or more tabs open at any given time.. but I've discovered something interesting about this version of FF. Normally FF will use around 60% or so of the 3GB in my laptop. It might go up a bit during a heavy session.

But now, memory usage gradually increases over a couple of hours until all RAM is in use.. at which point things freeze up for 10-15 seconds, then about 1/3 of my RAM is freed up, and things run smoothly again. This has happened 3 times now over the past 8 hours or so. Very strange.

(oh yeah.. the cosmetic changes can be switched back, if you like.. all the new looks and features can be individually enabled or disabled if you want. It just takes a bit of searching with the FF help system to find the articles)

In those 10 windows there usually is about 5 tabs (actaully at the moment I have 9 windows open and about 45 tabs spread throughout those 9 windows ).

I thought I'd noticed an increase in RAM usage as well - and I'm glad to see I wasn't just seeing things. Does sound pretty weird that this version cleans itself up - if it works and it's reliable, then I might be a bit better about the bloat.

I'm not sure what happened- restarting firefox this morning I see that I still have a standard menu, as well as the new menu. But as long as I have a classic menu, I can live with the other changes.

[Mauiby de Fug]

Finally got around to upgrading to FF29 today. Mainly because the RSS addon (for which amongst other things I use to read the bulletin board, rather than actively visit) decided to start playing up. Normally I run the beta version of Firefox, but for some reason I never got around to enabled that PPA on this installation of Lubuntu.

While I'm not that impressed with the cosmetic changes, it certainly feels a lot faster and smoother to me. I'm of the opinion that all applications should follow whatever the default system theme happens to be, but since Firefox uses its own toolkit I don't think that that works unless you install a specific theme to match it. My standard usage involves at last count about 150 tabs, of which most are in unopened tab groups and so not relevant, but when I'm working on programming something in particular I will often get to about 50 active tabs, at which point I'll have to close down Firefox and restart it to clear the memory. RAM in the laptop is 2GB, and I think that Firefox probably takes up about half of that when I'm in the afore-mentioned state of researching and working on something. At some point in the next few days I'm sure that I'll manage to get to that state again, at which point I'll see how it holds up under heavy load. I've always found it to be lighter and more responsive than Chromium, and don't anticipate changing browser any time soon, but will probably mess around with the various config settings and addons to restore the appearance somewhat...

[Diziet Sma]

Today FF29 seems to be much better behaved.. no weird memory fluctuations and if anything it seems to be using a little less memory than it did before the upgrade. The only thing I think has changed is that the laptop has had a reboot, whereas before it had been in and out of suspend mode several times.

So, eyes crossed, all seems well. Updates have now come out for a couple of addons that were crippled by the change, so Dizzy is a happy camper again.

[Astrobe]

In my opinion, having more than a dozen of tabs open is just silly. It is obvious that with today's web page full of flash, images, javascript, etc. it will burn gigabytes of memory and cripple your bandwidth. I don't understand why people complain and expect their browser to do tricks in order to deal with that silliness, when the solution to keep your favourite sites at hand without having to buy more RAM exist: it's called bookmarks. There are even some good speed dial extensions (for instance FVD speed dial for Firefox) that make them very visual and easy to use.

[Cody]

Hmm... I'm liking it so far (without any reversion Add-ons), but those curvy tabs are horrible. Any way to revert/change only those, guys?

[Diziet Sma]

In my opinion, having more than a dozen of tabs open is just silly. It is obvious that with today's web page full of flash, images, javascript, etc. it will burn gigabytes of memory and cripple your bandwidth. I don't understand why people complain and expect their browser to do tricks in order to deal with that silliness, when the solution to keep your favourite sites at hand without having to buy more RAM exist: it's called bookmarks. There are even some good speed dial extensions (for instance FVD speed dial for Firefox) that make them very visual and easy to use.

Some of us have several projects on the boil at any given time, and many things to research. Bookmarking all that temporarily needed stuff just leads to bloated bookmark lists, where it gets hard to find things, and hard to remember what was for what. Un-displayed pages don't use CPU cycles, and don't consume bandwidth, they merely take up some RAM. (and even that can be avoided, with an addon called TooManyTabs) Excessive flash, images and javascripts can easily be disabled by means of a good ad-blocker and no-script addons.

[Diziet Sma]

Hmm... I'm liking it so far (without any reversion Add-ons), but those curvy tabs are horrible. Any way to revert/change only those, guys?

See here, and scroll down to the list of settings. It looks like all features can be individually toggled on or off.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... erestorer/

[cim]

Excessive flash, images and javascripts can easily be disabled by means of a good ad-blocker and no-script addons.

And they'd really have to be quite excessive - the entire Javascript engine for Oolite reserves "just" 32MB of memory for (in 1.79) two scripts per ship (a couple of hundred of them), plus all your worldscripts, and usually has plenty of space to spare.

Images, similarly, individual pages shouldn't be needing more than a few hundred kB most of the time (sure, if you have two hundred tabs of image galleries).

I would consider memory usage of much more than 1Mb per tab to be quite excessive.

But now, memory usage gradually increases over a couple of hours until all RAM is in use.. at which point things freeze up for 10-15 seconds, then about 1/3 of my RAM is freed up, and things run smoothly again. This has happened 3 times now over the past 8 hours or so. Very strange.

Sounds like a garbage collection process in JS, with a very big JS heap. Surprising if it's happening now and not before, though, for the same sites.

[Diziet Sma]

Sounds like a garbage collection process in JS, with a very big JS heap. Surprising if it's happening now and not before, though, for the same sites.

As I mentioned above, I'm not seeing this since a reboot. I'm guessing it had some weird connection to the machine being suspended and awakened again several times beforehand.

[Cody]

See here, and scroll down to the list of settings. It looks like all features can be individually toggled on or off.

Yeah, I had been thinking of installing that Add-on - but as it's only the curvy tabs I object to (I'll adjust to 'tabs on top' - it does save space), I'll stick with 29 as is.