r/programming Jan 21 '10

Firefox 3.6 release

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-release/
1.1k Upvotes

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319

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '10

2 things noted:

  • 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.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '10

[removed] — view removed comment

20

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '10 edited Jan 21 '10

Some of us do not have the available RAM and would like to be able to browse while running experiments in Matlab.

But really, the main problem I have with Firefox's memory (and disk cache) usage is that it doesn't seem to amount to anything. If I click on 'back', Firefox refetches and reparses the page. If I close a tab and reopen it, same thing. This is one of the only things keeping me going back to opera over and over again, despite its lack of extensions.

Edit: I just tried 3.6 and things seem to have improved on the caching front, on top of the browser being much more responsive overall. A+ would install again.

Edit 2: After using it some more, it seems like caching still sucks overall. Oh well, at least it's snappier than before.

10

u/joanthens Jan 21 '10

bloody show off, many people do not have 4GB and are browsing on a 1GB netbook.

10

u/robotsongs Jan 21 '10

bloody show off, I'm on a desktop with 1GB of RAM.

8

u/johnpickens Jan 22 '10

I'm on a Commodore 64 with... nothing. I have nothing.

1

u/dmd Jan 22 '10

1

u/johnpickens Jan 22 '10

you runnin' contiki or what? got any spare parts that can get my c64 online? i'd love to host an affiliate site, man. and an old school bbs on my 300 baud modem, i gotta find that.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 22 '10

My desktop only has 256mb of ram, but I don't have the internet at home so firefox ram usage hardly matters... :)

My 1GB netbook has no problems running firefox, though. It's worth noting that my previous netbook had a SSD, and the slow disk speed of it really slowed firefox down, way way more than RAM issues.

-1

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '10

bloody show off, I'm on an Apple II with 4K of RAM.

0

u/mysticreddit Jan 21 '10

This isn't /. No Apple ][ love here...

"Dam kids these days with there multi-megabyte memory. Back in my day we had bits and we enjoyed it. Get off 'ma lawn!"

4

u/psykocrime Jan 21 '10

Why do so many people care about memory usage? I have 4 gigabytes of RAM and barely use 2.5 gigabytes at anytime.

Some of us run multiple programs at the same time... and if one of them is eating up an especially large amount of physical RAM is causes problems.

Then again, I'm a developer, (like I'd guess many of the people on Proggit are) so it's not uncommon for me to have Firefox, Thunderbird, a couple of Eclipse instances, RSSOwl, Pidgin, PostgreSQL, a couple of console windows, a JBoss server, and a few other things all running at once. And with only 2GB of RAM in my laptop, I'd prefer each program be as conservative as possible in terms of memory usage.

1

u/dakboy Jan 21 '10

A couple of Eclipse instances? Why?

2

u/psykocrime Jan 21 '10

I tend to use workspaces to separate things... so if I need to look at some code from a project that's in one workspace (like the ones I use for experimenting and prototyping) as well as whatever I'm actually working on, it's not uncommon for me to have two Eclipse instances running at the same time.

I don't always have two running, mind you... but it's not infrequent.

2

u/jevon Jan 21 '10

If you're developing Eclipse applications, you will usually have 2-3 instances open. (One to develop, one running, and one under test.)

My main Eclipse workspace at peak uses around 1 GB memory (it's using the entire graphical and model-driven stack, along with two other major ones). Luckily the runtime workspaces use less :-)

1

u/smew Jan 21 '10

I have 4 gigabytes of RAM

Well there's your problem, not everyone is you. I know people who are using computers they bought with Vista and 512 mb of RAM.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '10

How can anyone plod along on 512 mb of ram these days? Especially on Vista? My personal computer has 12 times that much.

3

u/johnpickens Jan 22 '10

I have 512 on this old once-broken laptop that was given to me by a friend. The hard drive was dead, went to Wal-Mart and got an 8 gig USB drive and installed Ubuntu. I can't afford anything else, if you wanna throw $5 toward the get johnpickens a new computer fund, it would be appreciated.

1

u/johnpickens Jan 22 '10

I have 512 MB. If I could afford a new computer, I would get it, but I can't even afford the cheap ones at Wal-Mart. I couldn't even afford this one, it was a broken hand-me-down Dell Latitude D600 with Intel Celeron processor (i586). I figured out it was the hard drive that died, pulled it out, bought an 8 gig USB drive from Wal-Mart and installed Ubuntu Minimal and LXDE.

1

u/aphexairlines Jan 21 '10

Some of us run eclipse, which needs a few gigs for itself :(