FF4 and IE9

[time]

Mubs, just as a reality check, try that page with Chrome and be amazed ...

I tried FF4 on another PC (2.7GHz Athlon X2) and it's down to one update per second, which is not enough to display the winking lights, so it's pretty much dark.

There's got to be something wrong with the software config on that PC, but after rigorous cleaning I don't yet know what. On the other hand, it runs Opera and Chrome just fine, so go figure.

 

[blakerwry]

http://glow.mozilla.org/ seems perfectly fluid for me in FF4 (is there a fps counter somewhere?)... hovering about 50% CPU usage (of each core) on a c2d E8400. Chrome displays perceptibly identically.

I'm not sure how the page is coded, but does this have anything to do with gfx performance? I have a low-end, and rather dated, but still mildly acceleration capable Geforce 7300SE... winXP

 

[CougTek]

Modern browsers power consumption compared

Source

Since the testing was done by Microsoft's employees, the identity of the winner is no surprise.

 

[time]

1. Despite using the latest version of IE, they tested with older versions of Chrome and Opera (Firefox 4 is of course brand new). HTML5 support is constantly evolving, so even a point release can make a very big difference.

2. I tried the 'CPU power states meter' app from the IE 9 demo site. Opera 'shrinks' after initially giving priority to a page (most noticeable if you minimize the whole application). Despite the meter showing way less power usage than Chrome or FF, the background color remained amber/yellow rather than green. Anyone would think Microsoft had already made up their mind what the results would show ...

 

[time]

I've had much more success with FF 4 on a further two PCs. It's giving similar results to Chrome and Opera on a variety of javascript pages.

I've even installed it on an Atom netbook, where again, it seemed mostly comparable to Chrome 11 and Opera 11.10.

I've yet to see any benefit from enabling extra graphics acceleration in either FF4 or Chrome 11 beta; the test machine had an ATI 4770.

 

[Mercutio]

Google, in a general display of awesome, has implemented browser-based Angry Birds for people who really want to waste their time and have their computer make lots of oink-oink noises.

It loads in Firefox and Chrome. I did not check suckier browsers.

It seems a lot easier when I'm not using my fingers.

 

[LunarMist]

What are those angry birds all about? Apparently my hexagonal-cored 2010 computer does not have the right technology for that activity. :tdown:

 

[Mercutio]

You probably need Flash and/or up to date support for HTML5. I'm not sure which.
The birds are angry because pigs stole their eggs.

 

[ddrueding]

This game would be a lot more fun if it quantified my attempts, and allowed me to specify new attempts numerically. Otherwise there is far too much chance involved.

 

[Mercutio]

It's easier with the mouse. You can use the stuff in the background to better eyeball your angle on a higher-resolution screen. There's definitely more chance involved with the mobile game than the browser version.

 

[Tannin]

Surprised to see the lack of positive comment here. FF4 is vastly improved over 3.x. Vastly. Hell, I actually use it quite often, and I never did like Firefox or use it more tan I could avoid.

Two big changes:

1 - a lot faster, hell, it may actually be quicker than Opera now (I haven't measured, but it's in the ballpark, which no other firefox version ever has been.)

2: they cleaned up the interface. I still don't especially like it, but it's better than half decent now and much improved. You still need Handy Xtra Stuff to fix the broken tab interface, but that aside, it's pretty decent straight out of the box.

Top marks to the Firefox team.

IE 9 - haven't seen it. Probably won't, as it doesn't run on XP and I don't run on Vista.

(And for those of you who recommend Windows 7, that's just Vista 2 with an un-broken kernel and an even worse interface.)

 

[Mercutio]

The only thing in all of Windows 7 that makes me say something nice about Vista is the fact that I have to do a bunch of extra navigation to see Folder and Printer sharing options. Vista had them all on the main Network and Sharing center screen and 7 makes me click through two more windows of crap to find that stuff.

 

[time]

For the last few weeks, I've been comparing different stuff - especially modern technology like HTML 5 - in different browsers on different platforms. Some conclusions so far:

* FF4 relies heavily on hardware graphics acceleration. Without it, it struggles with various kinds of graphical stuff. Especially SVG, where it is woeful. Obviously, it's more of a problem with legacy hardware.

For example, Angry Birds is unplayable on the PCs I've tried (including AMD IGP) that don't have dedicated 3D graphics cards (actually, it's still unplayable on my oldest PC with an ATI 9550 card).

* With Angry Birds, I tried an OpenGL accelerated alpha version of Opera 11, and it went from stop motion to very smooth. So you're still looking at hardware graphics power, despite Opera claiming their software rendering is just as capable as hardware acceleration. :roll:

* Chrome may be a PITA, but unsurprisingly (given the sponsor) it kills this game; it's reasonably playable in HD even on my ancient 1.8GHz Athlon single core. If this is Google flexing their muscles, I'm impressed.

* Downloaded the game to my Android phone and liked it a lot more. Go figure.

 

[blakerwry]

This may just be me and my browsing habits, but I'm starting to think of dumping XP because of FF4.

I have two problems that are related to FF4 under XP. First, since updating to FF4 my existing FF windows are blank if I access them via remote desktop - new FF windows display fine. This appears to be a problem with directX and some applications (according to my googling) which affects XP.

The second issue is that I sometimes use 1-1.5GB of RAM for FF alone. Thunderbird can easily use .5GB as well. XP doesn't seem to like to use 2GB of RAM or more (my XP system has 3GB). As I approach 2GB of RAM usage, my system starts to crawl and FF usually crashes. FF4.0 and the betas were all stable for me, but 4.0.1 has really been unstable for me on the XP box. I'm hoping that Win7 on the same hardware will result in a much more stable environment (I have no trouble on a different system that uses win7).

 

[Tannin]

Interesting, Blake. I've had no issues of that nature, and I use XP exclusively. But then, FF is usually my third browser (behind Opera and Seamonkey) and doesn't get the hammering with a zillion tabs and windows that Opera does - I suppose it's rare for me to have more than maybe 3 Firefox windows and ~20 tabs open at any one time.

My system occasionally clags up when I've got way too much stuff open, and the usual culprit seems to be the Flash player. Shut that down and everything works happily again. Some things never change.

 

[Mercutio]

I don't necessarily think that 1.5GB RAM for Firefox is necessarily outrageous if you have 50 open tabs and don't ever close the browser.

Thunderbird climbing all the way up to .5GB is weird, though.

 

[blakerwry]

I don't necessarily think that 1.5GB RAM for Firefox is necessarily outrageous if you have 50 open tabs and don't ever close the browser.

1.5GB is pretty regular for me. I only have 6 tabs open (across 3 windows) right now and am at 600MB. I started FF on Friday and didn't use it over the weekend (now Monday). Task manager shows that the peak usage was 1.5GB, which must have been Friday. I don't normally have more than 20 tabs open at a time, and lately I would consider myself lucky if FF 4.0.1 would make it more than a few days of use without crashing - plugins seem to be particularly troublesome and some sites will crash the browser consistently.

Thunderbird climbing all the way up to .5GB is weird, though.

I have 5 IMAP accounts; TB usually stays in the 150-250MB range. I don't usually catch it in the act of using more until something's wrong.

 

[Chewy509]

Since I don't/can't run IE9 I can't give a comparison, but at the moment:

FF 4.0.1, with 9 tabs open, I'm seeing 144MB usage. (2 being SF, 8 being Slashdot, and 1 on the Uni Website with a PDF open via the Acrobat plugin). The highest it's been is around 900MB, and that's after watching YouTube for a bit.

TB 3.1.9, with lightning running, I'm seeing 89MB usage. I only have a single POP3 account, so only light use there. Typically, TB will only get up to 120MB.

And to add something else to the mix, FF 4.0.0 was unstable for me, whilst 4.0.1 has been rock solid (and it fixed the URL address bar not updating bug). The only extensions/plugins installed are: Adblock, NoScript, Java, RealPlayer G2, Flash and the Acrobat PDF plugin.

 

[Mercutio]

I pretty consistently see TB use 240MB RAM on Windows machines no matter how many IMAP accounts it's checking. Some of my machines only check one and some of them check nine or ten.

I haven't seen an FF4 crash other than plugin container crashes from Flash.

 

[ddrueding]

Yup. Flash crashes on me quite regularly, though I'm not sure whether to blame Adobe or crappy site developers. GMail and Youtube never crash it, but Plantronic's site couldn't keep itself together this morning.

Edit: FF4.1 is using 972M of RAM for 7 tabs at the moment.

 

[sechs]

I don't necessarily think that 1.5GB RAM for Firefox is necessarily outrageous if you have 50 open tabs and don't ever close the browser.

I'm only at 1.1GB with 70 tabs.

 

[CougTek]

Open 70 tabs to Youtube videos. You won't mind Flash since you like Adobe so much. How much RAM does it take now?

 

[ddrueding]

I just opened 70 youtube tabs in addition to the 9 I was already using, and firefox didn't go over 1GB in RAM. This is my office machine, so it has plenty of RAM and CPU. No crash, no lagging, just a full internet connection and a bunch of conflicting audio.

 

[Mercutio]

Firefox should do a thing where it releases memory that is allocated for tabs you're not immediately using. As I understand things, the biggest issue with poorly coded flash applets has something to do with demanding to be refreshed too many times per second or something.

Youtube really isn't the place to go for misbehaving Flash. Try, like, alluc.org or something.

 

[Handruin]

Are you counting the plugin-container.exe when evaluating firefox memory? Otherwise misbehaving flash components rarely will cause the basic firefox executable to grow.

 

[ddrueding]

Including the plugin-container.exe (it was only ~100MB)

 

[sechs]

My results are similar.

 

[Mercutio]

Continuing the parade of stupid Chrome tricks: Play TIE Fighter in a DOSbox session natively inside Chrome. YA RLY.

 

[time]

Doesn't work on XP (unsupported). You get the DOS prompt but it wouldn't mount the game image etc.

 

[Mercutio]

I got tired of waiting for a couple of my important addons to get updated for FF4 support. I spent about 10 minutes googling for how to tell FF to make my older addons work in version 4, so here's the deal:

Open about:config
Create a new boolean value called extensions.checkCompatibility.4.0
Set it to False
Reinstall the addon.

 

[Mercutio]

It appears that VMware Server is really, really broken with Firefox 4 and as far as I know it never worked with Chrome. And that support for VMware Server 2 ended in January.

So I guess the best free option from VMware is now to make the VMs with Server and then run them through VMware Player?

 

[ddrueding]

Or build an ESXi box. It takes more hardware but is also free.

 

[Mercutio]

I should have amended my statement to software-only options. Given that VirtualPC is essentially free (and has dreadful support for anything that isn't Windows), I'm kind of surprised that there isn't a new VMware Server on the horizon. Maybe supporting it is too much of a pain?

And yes I am aware of Virtualbox, but right now I'm still mostly complaining that I have to run the Console Player in IE.

 

[time]

Couple of pieces about Firefox's inevitable demise (apologies that it's ZDNet and people may not think much of their OpEds):

Mozilla to enterprise customers: "Drop dead"

Firefox faces uncertain future as Google deal apparently ends

I can easily replace Firefox with other browsers; I'm more concerned about the consequences for Mozilla's Thunderbird, for which I don't know of any suitable replacement.

 

[Mercutio]

For all the recent trumpeting of Chrome as the successor to Firefox, two things are still true:
1. Firefox has a better add-ons infrastructure. Add-ons will probably keep me on Firefox for a long time to come.
2. Chrome uses a great deal more RAM with more tabs open. I suppose this isn't a huge deal when we all have 8GB RAM in our primary machines, but that's not every computer we have to use, either.

Anyway, were Firefox to switch to, what? Bing? Yahoo? I suspect it wouldn't have a tremendous impact on Google's share of search because most people who are smart enough to use Mycroft (the Firefox search bar) know how to change the default setting to whatever they want it to be (conversely, plenty of people have never even looked at the search bar in ANY browser and don't use them at all). Google's support for Firefox looks good from an antitrust perspective, which is something that I think will be seen as important going forward.

 

[sechs]

I think that Opera would kick it before Fx.

 

[Chewy509]

I think that Opera would kick it before Fx.

I hope not, since I've found Opera Mini (on Android) to be a better browser than the one Google ships with Android. (Opera has zero issues with the internal student websites at Uni, whilst the one that comes with Android has some significant issues, like not being able to download file attachments correctly).

 

[time]

Not to mention the huge saving in download quota that Opera Mini provides; have you checked the stats under Help - Data Usage?

 

[Chewy509]

Not to mention the huge saving in download quota that Opera Mini provides; have you checked the stats under Help - Data Usage?

I haven't, but that's mainly I restrict internet access to when I have some form of WiFi connection. (So I don't have to care about data usage in relation to my phone plan).

I've put a few other people on to Opera Mini at Uni, and they all believe how good it is compared to the stock browsers that their phones came with.

 

[Mercutio]

Since I just happened to look: Firefox 11, with 26 tabs open, is using 660MB RAM. That seems very reasonable. I really would have to say that it's a big improvement over where we were a year ago for RAM utilization. Chrome on this same machine is using 490MB with only four tabs open, and two of them are instances of Gmail.

While I'm at it, does anyone understand the purpose of the Chrome Web Store? If I add an "app" all it really does is dock a shortcut to a web site on my browser start page. How the hell is that different from making a bookmark? Why would I bother with that? Does Google think people are too stupid to bookmark things?