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RE: Firefox 7: Better Memory Management, Meh Performance (Review)
LoverockDavidson_-24231404894599612871915491754222 30th Sep
I did a clean install of FF 7 the other day. It used more memory on 2 different computers than previous versions, coming in at 400mb - 500mb and would severely slowdown or lock up after a few hours. Although since doing the 7.0.1 update its been running fine all day today. Despite this, I still choose Firefox over Chrome for the privacy, security, and add-ons.
@LoverockDavidson_
They HAVE to let the browser eat more RAM to make it faster. The competition is fierce these days and nobody wants to use a slug!
@Mikael_z Considering Firefox is still a slug sometimes, I don't think they're succeeding.
@CobraA1
Don't know what you're talking about.
I tested FF6, Chrome and Safari on the Sunspider javascript benchmark and let's say the difference was miniscule, roughly 190 ms each on my Mac with an Intel core i7. Displaying pages is at about the same speed too.
So speed isn't important when choosing among these three.
Wow, for once Loverock is not jocking!
Anyway, Chrome is a fine browser, but as long as they have no review process of their extensions- it is not a serious contender for 1st place. They also have to fix their memory management. It is far from great.
@kirovs@...
yea, Chrome is a fine browser, but as long as they have no review process of their extensions- it is not a serious contender for 1st place.
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Teh outrageouz!
Dietrich T. Schmitz * Your Linux Advocate 30th Sep
nt
How old of Acid3 results are you using? Acid3 has been officially changed such that now IE gets 100/100.

Plus, read these sentence a few times and see if they make any sense to you: "For example, Firefox 7 scored a perfect 100 on the Acid 3 compatibility test. This test checks how well a browser complies with various Web standards such as CSS, JavaScript, and Extensible Markup Language (XML), Firefox had a score of 97."

Looks like you're just copying and pasting erroneous information from previous articles...
a more thorough browser comparrison (since you are only trying to make firefox look worse than chrome): http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037.html

oh, and when you copy the url it automatically adds http:// so first try the feature before you criticize it
@aardmaat Thanks, I was a bit upset about the http:// thing until you pointed out that it is copied.
@aardmaat Thanks for posting this; I was just about to as well! Firefox squeaks by Chrome to take first place for the first time!
@aardmaat To do that, he would actually have to USE Firefox. How about comparing things like extensibility, and ability to customize the interface, where Firefox stands alone.
Just got the Firefox 8 beta.
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Meh review
eMJayy 30th Sep
You're only using Windows 7 SP1 as your test platform. Just because Chrome gets the fastest scores on that particular platform doesn't automatically imply that the browser is fastest on every OS platform. In my case, I use Ubuntu 11.04 as my main OS and on this machine, a 3GHz AMD dual core, Chrome comes in dead last on SunSpider....as usual.

The SunSpider tests I did just now gave this result -
Firefox 7 - 259.0ms +/- 1.4%
Opera 11.51 - 296.1ms +/- 1.1%
Chrome 14 - 336.2ms +/- 1.7%

SunSpider is the only test I pay any attention to because it's the only one whose findings correlate with my daily browsing experience. None of those other tests actually measures the things that matter the most to everyday people when it comes to using a browser.

For instance, none of them will tell you that Firefox renders pages more reliably than Chrome does. If you open 40 pages in Chrome and the same 40 pages in Firefox, Firefox will render each and every page perfectly every time, while Chrome might not, causing you to have to refresh a few tabs. I've also found that Firefox loads pictures in web pages noticeably faster than Chrome does. These things matter more to my browsing experience than which browser has new HTML5 features that may or may not ever reach the final draft of HTML5.
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Restore http in FF Address bar
lehnerus2000 1st Oct
I found this article.
Show http:// protocol in URL bar for Firefox 7+
http://jj.isgeek.net/2011/08/show-http-protocol-in-url-bar-for-firefox-7/

about:config
browser.urlbar.trimURLs
Change value to false

It worked for me. happy
I still think ZDNet's choice of HTML5 test suites is totally bogus.

I want a ****PURE**** HTML 5 test suite, not a "HTML 5 + a dozen other things we think are cool" test suite. And I want one that tries to be comprehensive, not one that picks and chooses favorites.
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nt
After all, chrome is built over firefox.

Additionally, I hate chrome's wipe-out when you reload the god darn pages. Hurt's your eyes, especially when you sit late night.
0945 156,000k. Twelve hours later 176,000k.
Not bad.
Realistically, with a PC say less than 3 years old, is the average user going to notice any difference in speed? IMHO stability, security, site compatibility and ability to install and run the add ons you want are the most important issues to the average punter (geeks aside). As an "average punter", I'm with Opera now - love the default "speed dial" page, and since I rediscovered Opera (version 11), very "site compatible" too.
Internet Explorer 10 in Win-8 with 2 ZDNET tabs open was using 72.5MB of R.A.M.

Firefox 7 in Win-8 with 1 ZDNET tab open was using 116.1MB of R.A.M.

A difference of 43.6MB more with half as many tabs open, I doubt FF-7 is using less memory as the other tests imply. Stats are from Task Manager in Win-8 while running I,E, 10 and FF-7 at the same time.
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No change...
wright_is Updated - 2nd Oct
Firefox 7 is still using a gob load of memory.

It has been running for 3 days and is using around 300MB wih 3 tabs open.

Restarting, with the same 4 tabs open, it is using 136MB, about 10% less than 6.0 on restarting.
Back in the 3.x days, I had to quit and relaunch it about every 5 days, otherwise it would slow down and become unusable. But with newer versions, it remains snappy even after running for weeks.

Of course, this is on Linux, which is inherently more reliable than Windows anyway.
The moment Chrome gets a proper download manager (a la DownThemAll), I'm off to Chrome. It now has everything I need -- speed dial, ad block, screen shot taking, minimum font size, etc etc -- and still much faster than FF.
Ooooohhh.... my browser loads my home page 3ms faster than your browser...
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especially when, by next week, or sooner, everybody will have been updated to Firefox 8, and then, the tests and reviews will have to be done all over again. In fact, I've already been "upgraded" to FF 8, and they have FF 9 already being tested (and I have a development version of it on my machine).

Anyhow, do any of the reviews ever bother to find out how the end user (not the tech community) feels about FF vs Chrome vs IE vs Opera, etc? Those are the only reviews that matter. The business community has already determined their browser(s) of choice, and they'll most likely update to newer versions of what they use, after they do their own testing.
I'm running Firefox 7.0.1, on Mint Linux 10, and it is TERRIBLE. So slow, and I get a warning that Firefox is not responding. Back to Chrome if this is the best I can expect now. 7.0 was fine.
I don't care what those tests say, Firefox 7 is performing much better for me than previous versions, so I'm happy!
And yet another fanboi article by SVJN. It feels just as fast as chrome does imho, and doesn't have as many site incompatibility issues.

It feels like he judges speed solely based on benchmarks while completely ignoring that it feels just as fast.
Firefox 7 on OS X still suffers from serious memory leaks. This problem has persisted since Firefox 4. Running FF7 on a Windows Vista machine and the problme does not occur. On OS X, FF7 will always fail after some time even if you are not actively clicking around. A secondary problem which occurs less frequently is that the FF Shockwave Flash plugin goes into 100% CPU mode. Again, I have not seen this on the PC.
I actually changed browsers (to Chrome) when I first met these problems in FF4 but Choromw had a bug that meant I couldn't move all my bookmarks etc from FF4 to Chrome. I dealt with it for a couple of months and then decided to switch back to FF only to find that FF4 had now become FF6 - two versions in two months! Now it FF7 but still the memory problems persist

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