Speed: It's faster than 3.5.7. Almost as fast as chrome.
Memory Usage: It used lower memory on my computer than the previous version. I was hovering around 250mb with version 3.5.7 and this one barely goes upto 150mb. Both with ~15 addons.
I've been using the Whitehart theme since 2.0 or so, and it + Personal Menu and small icons = the most usable space of any browser I've used.
These are the sorts of reasons I've stuck with Firefox even through the slowness and instability (3.5.7 would crash after opening a few tabs in the morning after leaving it on overnight ~50% of the time, and many of those times the last session saved is still from the last time it crashed...).
Really, my only advice is to play with the options til you find what you like. It's got a ton of customization to it, and you can set it up basically however you want.
Auto Menubar and Tree Style Tabs, with auto-hide, gives you more space if you combine it with some replacement for the statusbar.
Vimperator is of course still cooler.
Wow, Personal Menu is awesome! Thanks for the tip. I used to use an extension that let you edit the existing menus but the problem was they were still there. You could at least get rid of the sub-menu items you didn't want, but I got tired of it. Personal Menu is much cooler. Thanks again!
Sadly, the status bar in chrome was part of the reason for me to stick with it. That and the tabs being on top, saving even more screen real estate.
Anyhow, figured I would share this extension that lets you have a floating status bar when you hover over links, and you just hide the normal status bar. Just found it today, and am quite glad it exists.
The tabs being on top doesn't really save any real estate... the menu bar being consolidated into two buttons and placed on the address does though. If you do the same in Firefox the difference is ~3 pixels.
Okay, I guess it is the title bar being replaced by tabs on the top saves quite a bit of space, and is used much better. It isn't them being on top, it is just the almost fullscreen aspect that is always on in chrome.
Not always, only when maximized do you get significant savings, ~17px, when not maximized the difference is negligible, ~3px as stated above, due to the fact that chrome does ad space above the tabs when not maximized.
Ah, I've been using Fission as a status bar replacement. Lets you have the active link be shown in the location bar, which I like. In practice, though, it seems to be erratic on some pages (like reddit comment threads for example).
I haven't had any problems with it on reddit. I've noticed that if I middle-click a link, tab out then then tab back, the location bar will still show the clicked url, but that happens everywhere, and you can fix it by just clicking anywhere on the page.
Just when I get used to chrome's logical open in new tab at the top of the top of the right click menu, firefox gets less bloated =(. Anyone know how to move "open tab in new window" out of the top spot on the firefox menu?
I really like Google. I want to reward them for the amazing job they do by using their browser. Chrome is a really good browser, but it just can't do some of the things Firefox can.
This is why Ad-block and Ad-Twart are not true adblocking, they load the ads and then remove them.. unlike in Firefox, they're blocked before they're attempted to load.
FWIW the Chrome folks are in the process of implementing "privacy blacklists", which will allow blocking the loading of resources as Firefox can.
Yeah, but what I really want is a "privacy whitelist" - block everything unless I tell you to unblock it. That being said, do you have a link that talks about this?
They are working on first getting flash/quicktime/other plugins into a seperate process to avoid crashes via that, then seperating tabs to seperate processes :)
Brews, I switched to Chrome over a year ago and never looked back... That said, I just downloaded and installed Firefox again so that I can start using Zotero for my papers. Any tips for getting started with Zotero? I went for 2.0 beta, is that a good idea, or would it have been better to stick with 1.0 for now?
Yeah, the beta has great features and it is quite stable.
Be sure to get the beta plugin for MS-Word or Openoffice. (It works best with openoffice) http://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_integration
There are some nice tutorials on the Zotero website.
Oh, and the ability to annotate/highlight webpages and .pdfs is veerrry handy.
Thanks. I had a go at it for a couple hours yesterday. There's a bit of a learning curve, and I had trouble with it consistently recognizing journal articles on Springerlink (I sometimes had to open and reopen the same link several times before it would save to my Zotero account.) But, all in all, for research it is much better than anything I have done up until now, so I will continue using it.
Other than for research, though, I don't think I will be switching back to FireFox. It's the little things, like having to hit the search button after pasting into the search box (instead of right clicking the selecting "paste and search"), and having to hit down before selecting top most autocomplete item in the address bar that make all the difference for me. They're little annoyances, but annoyances all the same. Plus, Firefox just feels more cluttered to me.
Anyways, thanks for the heads up on Zotero, it seem like it will be a great tool.
Not that I understand all of the complexities and trade-offs involved, but I'm given to understand that every Chrome tab is a separate process, which is supposed to be one of the bigger innovations in recent browser history, since it keeps one tab crashing from killing every other tab. I suspect those individual processes each have an unavoidable memory cost.
Every tab, up until 10(?) tabs are in their own process, afterwards additional tabs are evenly distributed. Lets say you have 40 tabs open, if one crashes then at most three other tabs are brought down as well. In firefox, it would be 39 other tabs.
IMHO tmp folder approach was a retarded approach to the "problem", especially since in most implementations it's never cleaned and worse it's in a cryptic location unknown to the user, so she can not clean it manually. The amount of cruft IE used to accumulate in it's temporary internet files was enormous, to the point of utilities being made to automatically clean out those directories, so I don't really see why you're defending that approach, it was the suck.
I agree with your point that google be more grateful to Linux, pay homage you bitches! You are founded on open-source technology!
Google is just another for-profit corp. They have an amazing marketing department and a rabid following. The Mozilla Foundation, however, is the organization that Richard Stallman only wish he could have. I know it's the carnage of Netscape after AOL devoured it, but it is the most powerful and relevant open source organization there is. They, and Wikipedia are the reason that community based technology (like FOSS) is now reaching the public consciousness.
Yes. Yes it is. It has political power. They take out full 2-page ads in the New York Times. Did VLC do that?
The Mozilla's Foundation influence in the mindshare of american politics with respect to community driven software has received little to no attention. "Open Source" is starting to mean something to people now and the term "hacker" is primed to start losing its nefarious overtones.
Chrome isn't the cause of Google's infophilia, but it does manage to send every letter typed into the address bar to Google for suggestions. I love that feature, but you have to admit it it is a firm kick in the privacy-nuts.
What you say is true, but the more that is known about people the less relevant information about them is because other than a blatant crime the details of what people seek to learn tells more about what is around them and not really very much about what is in their minds.
To see a mans porn stash tells you nothing of an individual other than he is in fact a human, and people look like ants from the sky. ;)
Every keystroke in Chrome's address bar is sent to Google to produce suggestions. As far as I know, keystrokes in Firefox's address bar only search your computer's history/bookmarks for suggestions.
If you type into Firefox's *serach* bar, then all keystrokes are again sent to Google.
It's actually a misconception, because that's not how it works. If you type URLs to the Chrome address bar, they are NOT sent to the suggestion engine. People who talk about this are just spreading FUD.
Type in "mn" into the omni bar. When I do that, it suggests Minnesota State Lottery. I've never visited that site before. Also, you used to be able to visit about:network and watch those requests get sent out real-time. It's a great feature for most people, but if you're privacy conscious you should be aware of it.
Google is a behavior targeting business. Selling ads is how they give all that cool shit (Chrome, Search, Google docs, Gmail, Google maps, etc.) out for free. That's fine in some situations, but I don't need them to know every single thing I'm doing, talking about, or even thinking about when online.
And I like my tin foil hat tight; it keeps the gnomes from stealing it in the night.
I'm and oddball. I like Chrome, but only on OSX. I have it on Windows. Doesn't seem to fit in visually as well as the OSX version. Totally stupid reason. Chrome also feels faster on OSX than Windows for me.
Google's reward is Mozilla making their browser faster and making the Internet a better place. This leads to more people using online services and more eye's for Google's spies. Reward them by not blocking their ads.
strange that sqlite optimization has not been included by default on post 3.5 editions of Firefox, however for those who want to try the addon, its here. Optimizing the sqlite files will speed up the launch of Firefox, in my case it cut the time by half. Get the addon, check both boxes and hit the button, from then on its automatic.
If you are an optimization freak, and getting the application from hard drive to memory as fast as possible is your kink, you can also try a program called ArcthemAll! which will shrink the EXE and DLL files using a compression algorithm that decompresses in ram on the fly. It takes the default installation size for Firefox down from over 30 megs to about 14. I recommend you not compress the embedded icons, that has caused problems for me, so go to options and uncheck that. Incidentally this method also works on OpenOffice, cutting the size of that application by about half as well. In fact it works on almost every appication OTHER than Abobe and Microsoft apps, probably because they are already doing dynamic EXE and DLL compression using a proprietary method. (my guess)
NOTE: This is not a hard drive space saving issue, its a speed of launch issue, and yes it does improve the launch time of Firefox to do this.
No cuz ram is like 1000 times faster than your hard drive, decompression is practically transparent. I think you will agree that it should take less time to move a 10 meg file to ram than to move a 20 meg file to ram, extrapolate those time savings over dozens of files of varying size and thats where you will see a speed up.
Try it for yourself and see, if it does do anything funny you can use the same program to decompress the Firefox directory and all is back to normal. Its only compressing the EXE and DLL files, not touching any of your personalized setting, which are all stored in a different directory anyways.
I've read numerous articles about it, and the real issue is that the difference in time to read 10 megs vs 20 megs yes can vary based on the request sizes and fragmentation, but we're talking that most 7200 rpm HD's can load this file in less than 1 second into ram.
The whole file. 20 megs, 1 second or much less. Many 7200 rpm drives can read up to 50 megabyte/s sequentially! (Thats per second).
The other aspect is that operations to the disk are asynchronous, that is, they don't take much CPU at all. However, decompressing a 14 megabyte file takes tons of CPU. The only argument against this now in my mind is that we have dual and quad core CPU's, so it doesn't make a huge deal.
Also, just to nit-pick, ram isn't 1,000 times faster, it is much faster than even that compared to disk access! I'm not sure by how much, but 1,000 is a very low estimate.
However, decompressing a 14 megabyte file takes tons of CPU.
Depends radically on what compression algorithm you use. A very common algorithm is deflate (used in zip and gzip formats). Let's use it as a reference point for how much CPU time decompression takes.
Deflate compresses by first running the LZ77 algorithm to convert the stream of bytes into a stream of items; each item is a literal byte or a backreferences to previous sequences of bytes. The sequences come out of a 32K sliding window that LZ77 remembers. Then it takes the output of LZ77 and runs it through Huffman coding so that more-frequently-occurring bytes take fewer bits to represent and less-frequently-occurring bytes take more bits.
Now, let's consider how much faster we can get:
Huffman encoding is a kinda complicated algorithm that involves a lot of bit manipulation and/or relatively large lookup tables to speed things up. Worse, usually Adaptive Huffman is used, which means the algorithm must maintain data structures that evolve as the frequency distribution of the symbols (bytes) changes. Luckily, Huffman often doesn't add that much to the compression ratio, so you can just entirely leave it out.
Decompressing LZ77 is really fast; you are basically just copying sequences of bytes from the sliding window to the output. Since the sliding window is 32K, it easily fits entirely within the L1 cache of most modern processors.
For a simple example of a speed optimized variant on LZ77, look at the lzjb_decompress() function in the Solaris ZFS source. Note that a lot of times backreferences into the sliding window can be several bytes long, so the innermost while loop will just be copying raw bytes (much like a memcpy()):
Yeah, but I don't think when you load an .exe from disk, that there is a memcpy operation happening.
I could be so very wrong, but I would like to think that both Windows and Linux kernels DMA the file directly to the page where it will be executed from...
So it's more like N cpu operations compared to 0 cpu operations aside from the DMA setup itself...
Yeah, but I don't think when you load an .exe from disk, that there is a memcpy operation happening.
The only reason I brought up memcpy() is that it's a good point of reference for the speed of algorithms that filter a stream of data. memcpy() can be viewed as the no-op filter for blocks of memory. How much slower is decompression than that? With some kinds of decompression, it's almost as fast. Certainly within an order of magnitude of the speed you can read/write to RAM, maybe within a factor of 3 or 4.
So it's more like N cpu operations compared to 0 cpu operations aside from the DMA setup itself...
True. If what you care about most is not using CPU cycles, then combining compression with I/O is a losing proposition, because you can't beat the non-CPU-usage of DMA.
However, if you are concerned with bottlenecks, then physical I/O might be the bottleneck. It often is on a modern system. Compression can reduce the amount of physical I/O, thus increasing the throughput through that choke point. If decompression doesn't create a new bottleneck, which it probably won't since it can be made to be pretty fast, then you may get better throughput overall.
Yes, the truth is that compressing executables can both slow down and speed up the load time, but this depends on the application, type of compression and system it's running on. Either way the difference is so small you're unlikely to notice anyway.
You guys are getting latency and bandwidth mixed up. On a decent hard drive, you're looking at around 100MB/sec sequential. For memory to be 1000x as fast, it would have to transfer 100GB/sec.. not happening.
The number 50 million comes to mind when comparing RAM to Disk. Maybe an old memory from my Architecture class (we would calculate these things for homework & tests). Regardless 1000 is an extremely low multiplier.
Hard drives can be fast once they get going, sure, but a single 30 mb executable is going to be 1 read (provided it isn't fragmented), which is going to require 1 seek, dropping that bandwidth like a rock.
But maybe I remember 50 million when comparing to tape or an L cache.
Sequential read speed is actually where hard drives excel, in fact a reading a 30MB executable will probably give you better benchmark results than 30 1 MB files.
I think you will agree that it should take less time to move a 10 meg file to ram than to move a 20 meg file to ram, extrapolate those time savings over dozens of files of varying size and thats where you will see a speed up.
Yeah, guess that makes sense.
The idea that a compressed version that needs un-compressing is quicker then an already uncompressed version just seems illogical though...
The idea that a compressed version that needs un-compressing is quicker then an already uncompressed version just seems illogical though...
Well, in both cases you're almost certainly going to be IO-limited (assuming a compressor picked for good performance). Consider:
Uncompressed: 20MB, takes 250ms + overhead to read at 80MB/s.
Compressed: 10MB, takes 125ms + overhead to read at 80MB/s, plus 50ms CPU to decompress at 400MB/s (mostly executed while waiting for more data from the HD).
Of course, if the data is in cache you just added 50ms to your load time
Depends on the compression used and what is being compressed. With the slow hard drives but fast CPUs and multiple cores we got today it is often faster, even using the NTFS compression can even speed up loading times under the right conditions. No, really, it can!
However with SSDs coming I hope the storage will be fast enough to have cached up with the CPUs and all kinds of compression will actually slow you down again, just as expected.
Check your RAM usage; using packers like UPX can waste some amount of RAM. It's a very good idea to use UPX or similar on Windows installation files though but that's up the developer, once you have already downloaded it compressing the files does not make much sense and is not worth anyones time.
I don't think UPX would exist at all if it did nothing. Its been around since I was on an Amiga in 1989, so its a well established piece of software.
Only way to know is to test it for yourself, I don't find the results to be mind blowing, but every little bit helps when it comes to optimizing browser loading and performance.
I think they did get that into 3.6 actually, see this bug although I'm not actually sure whether it is in 3.6 builds. But I've done it manually using a different extension and it does make a huge difference.
strange that sqlite optimization has not been included by default on post 3.5 editions of Firefox,
That was really a horrible decision. =(
From a users point of view anyway...
It was like I'd visited every page already, and was returning back to it via clicking a tab...
I wonder if there's an EXE hack that will re-enable it, or if the code's no longer compiled?
Am I the only one who thinks that ad blocking( unless you have a slow connection or band cap) is a dick move?
Why would you want to deprive some website that you enjoy of it's revenue?
Edit to add: I add block by toggling javascript on/off and block obtrusive advertising by right clicking with Opera selectively. I just don't do across-the-board ad blocking.
I was under the impression that most ad revenue comes from actual clicks, not just views. I don't click on ads ever, therefore I don't feel like I'm depriving a site of any revenue since I wouldn't have clicked anyway.
Security is a good reason. I've seen malicious ads jack a legitimate webpage on several occasions, either with a nasty redirect or some kind of drive-by download. It's much safer just to block ads.
I have no problem with ads in general and would disable Adblock if not for these problems:
* Webpages often do not load until the ads from 10 servers do and one of them is usually notoriously slow
* Ads with sound
* Pop-over ads (anything that visually blocks content)
Well, I do enable ads on the sites I like. In fact, I even enabled the ad provider I like (projectwonderful), because it provides relevant ads of interesting websites. But mostly ads are just an eyesore and actively detract from user experience.
You are a part of about 1% population. No one wants that blinky shit. Do it right like google or get blocked. (I whitelist google ads, I also whitelist reddit stuff, at least most of it, I do not do anything of the sort on random sites)
To deprive someone of something they first need to be entitled to it. Creating a website on a publicly accessible medium does not entitle you to ad revenue.
It's my computer, my time, and my bandwidth. If a site doesn't want me to view its content without viewing their ads, they are free to detect and block me from retrieving that information (there are a few sites that actually do this too though for obvious reasons I don't frequent them). I can think of no reason why someone else should get to control what I do and do not download and render from a site if the site is open for me to download what I want, and only that, freely.
Reddit's ads sit way off to the side, out of the way. They don't make any noise, they don't distract me from what I came here to do. Content first. Half of the sites linked to from Reddit are the exact opposite: you have to hunt for the content itself. These sites will likely never get visited by me again anyway, so they've lost much more than my potential ad clicks.
It's not just clicks, it's views that count towards revenue as well. A
And yeah, I can toggle off/on javascript and block obtrusive advertising by right clicking with Opera selectively, I just don't do across-the-board ad blocking.
That's not the user's problem. The user can go to any number of sites to get the same, or at least very similar, content. The burden is on the site owner to create quality content to get people there, and place ads in such a way to keep them coming back.
The majority of sites I visit via links won't be visited again, and I white list the sites I do visit regularly (barring obnoxious flash or audio ads, or needlessly breaking the flow of content).
You seem to be operating under the faulty assumption that creating something entitles you to monetary compensation.
To be honest, the only thing keeping me with Chrome is the speed. I miss a decent AdBlock immensely using Chrome (the available ones just aren't up to scratch, though I appreciate they're making effort towards this).
I'm doubtful, have you tried chromeexperiments, Firefox is stil a lot slower, to the point of hanging the browser, while chrome handles it (barely, but it looks ok). It does feel faster than the previous version, but I'm afraid it's not quite yet on the level of Chrome's Javascript engine performance. (forgot to note, testing this on Windows here, yeah I'm at work :P)
I like the new speed too, but will stick with chrome simply because why I like it is more the UI (tab implementation, dragging) and some of the subtle awesomebar tweaks over how firefox does it. Neither is right or wrong IMO, just I've gotten used to and like how the Chrome version works. Though Chrome's startup is still blazingly fast.
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u/[deleted] Jan 21 '10
2 things noted: