2005-12-04 Trunk builds
Fixes:
- Fixed: 241518 - Calling addEventListener with a closure holding a content node leaks the document. (If I understand correctly, this bug caused Firefox to leak a lot when using some Greasemonkey scripts.)
- Fixed: 315841 - Java applets disappear when you have plugin registered with content policy (e.g. with Adblock).
- Fixed: 304243 - When Flash Shockwave or Java Applet plug-in is active on another tab, clicking Back causes that tab to go back.
- Fixed: 312415 - Selected images (from a selection of the document to print) are black.
- Fixed: 312566 - [Windows] Fix MouseTrailer and other mouse handling issues (Was: Try to get rid of MouseTrailer).
- Fixed: 307399 - [Windows] Moving mouse from menu to titlebar leaves menu highlighted.
- Fixed: 314856 - [Mac] Touchpad (two-finger) scrolling way too fast on Mac OS X 10.4.3.
- Fixed: 305970 - [Linux] Certain UI operations (opening dialogs, drag and drop) cause refresh, prolonged hang (CPU at 100%) (since April?).
Fixes for trunk regressions:
- Fixed: 315966 - [Mac] Bottom-to-top image crashes (since Nov 10).
Trunk regressions:
- Since Sept 22: 309521 - Puzzle-piece UI for missing plugins is missing.
Trunk checkins between 2005-11-26 06:00 and 2005-12-04 06:00
December 4th, 2005 at 11:42 am
Any guesses as to when this fix might appear in a release? Hopefully we don’t have to wait until 2.0 …
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241518
December 4th, 2005 at 2:21 pm
Seeing as these are trunk fixes and Fx2.0 will be built from the branch I’m guessing Fx3.0 will have the fix.
December 4th, 2005 at 2:42 pm
Where did you read that Fx2.0 will be released from the branch?
December 4th, 2005 at 3:35 pm
Just a pedant’s note that this post is Trunk fixes, but is in the Branch category
December 4th, 2005 at 4:03 pm
Fx2 will be built from the current trunk, which at some time will be, itself, branched onto a Mozilla_2_0_BRANCH, FF1.5.x will continue to be released from the current MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH but thats a dead end, no new engineering will be goinging into it, mostly just low risk fixes, and security related fixes. This is of course barring changes and the possible chance of a FF 1.75 release, but i’m just speaking hypothetically there, I wouldn’t figure such a thing would happen. FF2 / MOZ2 are well on there way engineeringly speaking.
December 4th, 2005 at 4:45 pm
Nope. Fx2 will be built from the 1.8.1 branch (which will be branched from the current 1.8 branch soon). The current trunk isn’t scheduled to branch off for Fx3 until late 2006.
This all assumes no changes from the current draft of the roadmap–and there are always changes.
http://cbeard.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/releaseroadmapdraftv1_2.png
December 5th, 2005 at 7:57 am
This release plan sounds a bit odd to me. First people are going to expect big changes due to the “2.0” moniker and it seems this version is really only going to be a minor upgrade (since it’s released from the branch). Second, following this up almost immediately by another major release (3.0 after only two quarters) will add to the very confused message that people will receive as to what they can expect from the Firefox releases.
December 5th, 2005 at 8:37 am
I tried heavily FF 1.5 final theese days, I am really satisfied with stability and robustness, but memmory is a B I G problem.
Normaly, ANYONE within a minutes can try this. Browse a little, then begin to close windows. That ONLY ONE! will remain. FF eats my memmory 212 MB! when all tabs were opened, and 206MB (peak 223) with just ONE TAB AND MINIMIZED!
I left it for an hour idle that it will release the memmory, no chance. So I close the FF, opened that one tab, it took 23MB of Memmory, that is 10 times lower usage.
I tried the same today, just a quick reproduction, the same with 105 MB memmory eating and just one tab. Note, IE minimized will eat cca 4-6 MB of memmory and it can have 10 windows opened!
I mean this is some serious stuff! I need to restart FF all the time, I can’t have it open when I am doing other, memmory intensive work, like developing, which really SUX!
December 5th, 2005 at 10:40 am
nestastnik, I hear ya. My mum opens 25+ firefox windows and leaves them open for days. This leads to 256MB-500MB usage on a 512MB machine. Since firefox keeps going into swap, she has begun using IE again because, most of the time, it doesn’t have the same problem. To be fair to 1.5, this also happened in 1.07.
Are there any tweaks we can make to firefox use less memory?
December 5th, 2005 at 1:27 pm
We have to wait until some “popular” and brave guy will write a post in his blog about memory problems, there will be some flame etc. and maybe then problems will be sorted out. Until then we have to keep the silence. I do not like it either but that’s life.
AFAIK there are no tweaks for memory problems. Somebody could give you http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:config_Entries#Config..2A or http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:config_Entries#Browser..2A (browser. cache.*) but it does not really help.
Maybe it’s time to give a chance to K-meleon http://kmeleon.blogspot.com/2005/12/k-meleonccf-me-0048.html if you use windows.
Really excelent builds – not rock stable as a beta but so damn fast and responsive! I wish Firefox would be at least close to it. You can have session saver http://boisso.free.fr/kmeleon.html
December 5th, 2005 at 5:58 pm
I have exactly the same problem. Firefox used to use 250-500MB when I Had 512MB ram wich leads to swapping, general slowness & high cpu usage when opening new tabs/windows.
If you mention it on the Mozillazine forums you get attacked or it isn’t possible (just because you don’t experience it it doesn’t excist) or people say memory is cheap buy some more.
Well out of pure frustration and since I tend to use other applications wich use a lot of memory I upgraded to 3×512=1.5GB of ram and guess what Firefox now uses 650-750MB normally.
I really wish they would for once do something about the insane memory usage.
By the way tweaking user.js doesn’t help at all and I had to install Flashblock to keep Firefox from freezing with Flash content in tabs too.
Memory usage atm 291.416KB/468.492KB VM (37 Tabs opened, less tabs gives the same problem) , because I restarted Firefox earlier on, add some surfing during dinner on pc tech sites and it’ll go up to 650-700 and even more if I don’t restart.
Now this all might sound pretty negative but all in all it’s a good product but the memory leaks have to get fixed.
December 5th, 2005 at 7:18 pm
If any of you are interested in helping to find/fix leaks in Firefox/extensions, I encourage you to watch bugs dbaron files with the “mlk” keyword and check out the following pages:
* http://www.mozilla.org/performance/leak-brownbag.html
* http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xpcom/MemoryTools.html
* http://www.mozilla.org/scriptable/avoiding-leaks.html
I’m sure dbaron would appreciate some help with finding and fixing leaks. He might even be willing to help you figure out how to use the tools if you’re interested in helping.
December 5th, 2005 at 10:33 pm
Btw, memory leaks aren’t the only things that can make Firefox’s memory usage high. Other causes:
* Bugs where data structures use more memory than they really need.
* Caching images, web pages, and rendered web pages in memory.
* Memory fragmentation (see bug 276342).
December 5th, 2005 at 10:34 pm
Actually it’s pretty hard to reproduce these leaks step by step. I was able to open many tabs and see no memory problems at all. Usually I use
December 5th, 2005 at 10:37 pm
Something went wrong. :(
http://img229.imageshack.us/my.php?image=20051204firefox159cc.gif
December 5th, 2005 at 10:38 pm
Well, figuring out how to reproduce a leak step by step is a good first step to getting it fixed. Another is to give a stack trace showing where the object was allocated. Note that you’ll need a better tool than Task Manager to tell whether and what Firefox is leaking.
December 6th, 2005 at 2:15 am
Dennis J. – 1.5 upgraded the back-end, 2.0 is upgrading the front-end. This makes sense as that’s what users will notice.
nestastnik – there is a thing that windows does to swap the program’s memory out to disk, however that’s disabled, but you can still re-enable it I think (add the pref config.trim_on_minimize no longer works and set to true). You can also get her to try the SessionSaver extension.
December 6th, 2005 at 11:57 am
Wow CooLynX I wish Firefox would use such a small amount of memory here.
Even when I close Firefox and reopen it with the 25 tabs saved by session saver it already starts at 200MB+
I had a look at your links Jesse Rudderman and the memory leak finding tools look kinda complicated.
I’m no programmer, though I had a minimal amount of pascal 2.0 in school and i know html & css but I’m far from beeing an expert at it.
I’m intrested in getting the memory usage down but I doubt I’d be of much help.
For me the memory usage is easily to reproduce. I start with my daily round of tech sites and after a few hours depending on wether I loaded a bunch of tabs or started with no tabs i’m at 600MB+.
For testing I tried to keep surfing once to see I i could go beyond 1000MB wich turned out to be no problem at all but browsing became really frustrating since opening a new tab/window causes(d) Firefox to use a lot of cpu power and the whole browser hangs for a few seconds if there are a lot of tabs opened and Firefox hasen’t been restarted for a while.
December 6th, 2005 at 12:45 pm
Completely off topic (sort of), but it’s worth trying even if it is a little naughty to ask questions in a blog….
Do you know of, or have any knowledge of the alpha image transparency support of png images on linux? There could be much more specific items I’m leaving out, but if you go to this page:
http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/tests/widget/test_FisheyeList.html
And mouse over the items you’ll notice (on linux at least, i’m running fc4 with latest yum updates from most repos like dries/livna/etc..) that the png image scaling doesn’t really perform so well. It works swiimmingly with FF on windows, but not linux.
It’s not a huge deal, but without very much luck searching through bugzilla for a definitive answer I thought I’d ask here.
jesse
December 7th, 2005 at 1:25 pm
Coollynx: Turn on the “Peak Mem Usage” column in your task manager to see the most that FF task has consumed.
December 9th, 2005 at 1:23 am
Partly I solved my lag problem by setting browser.cache.disk.enable to false. Now everything runs smooth. It still does not free the memory when you close tabs but it’s no more so annoying as it was before.
Running 9 tabs with normal sites and no image galleries I have this http://img205.imageshack.us/my.php?image=firefox200512095bs.png
Jesse Ruderman, I checked those sites and they look to complicated to me and time consuming right now.
December 9th, 2005 at 7:43 pm
Nice CooLynX.
I lowered bfcache from my previous setting wich 6 to 5 and I’m now at (see picture) wich is an improvement already but still quite a lot.
http://img219.imageshack.us/my.php?image=firefoxmemusage1012200537tabs5.png