a possible explanation why firefox is bloated

funkyou · 2006-12-10 17:04:41

I found this on a german blog... The guy who writes this has definitely an idea what he is writing about, because he is the author of some wonderful programs like dietlibc or minit...

Here is the translation:

Ok, now I am officially shocked. I let run Firefox with the Malloc Wrapper, loaded digg.com, and then clicked on two links before I closed Firefox again. The whole process took only seconds, and the malloc log was nearly 150 MB big. In it were approximately 1 million malloc and calloc and approximately 2 millions realloc and free. That is barbarian, how inefficiently nowadays one programs! Have the people no shame?! Unbelievably.

I am quite amused by this

...and it goes further:

Scary! I let an evaluation script run over the Firefox Malloc trace, and there are messages coming like this:
free called on non-malloced pointer 0x2aaaaeb11010!?
Oh no! And 70k complaints over frees on pointers, which did not came out of malloc or realloc. ELF guarantees that also libc internal calls e.g. from opendir/closedir are returned, so to that extent I am genuinly at being astonished just how it could came to it. In any case the above free is bogus, because this address is on the stack. If such is handed over to a free(), then its a major fuckup and can also have safety consequences. Man man man, the software around us is genuinly just for the foot.

He also wrote in a former article that he will check this with some other software like KDE, so i am definitely looking forward for the results

ps: translation is not perfect, but i think you'll get the point...

phrakture · 2006-12-10 21:49:42

Wow... it seems the firefox people need to learn how to deal with memory.

Damnshock · 2006-12-10 22:29:20

Firefox developers have got a lot of work to do

Meanwhile, my konky is awesome!!!

Gullible Jones · 2006-12-12 20:43:50

I knew it, I bloody knew it! It is bloody bloatware! Hah!

skymt · 2006-12-13 01:45:16

But it's just memory caching, right? It's a feature, not a bug! Firefox can't have bugs, it's open source! It's more secure! It has extensions!! It's not M$ Internet Exploder!!! (*whimper*)

(The above was an impression of a typical Slashdot/Digg comment. Please don't mistake it for any sort of actual opinion, especially mine.)

phrakture · 2006-12-13 15:46:30

skymt wrote:

(The above was an impression of a typical Slashdot/Digg comment. Please don't mistake it for any sort of actual opinion, especially mine.)

I lol'd

Gullible Jones · 2006-12-13 20:26:23

Actually I'm kind of surprised how few people have pointed out the Microsoftish quality of the "it's a feature not a bug" mantra.

Romashka · 2006-12-14 14:21:23

Wow...
I remember past days when Opera crashed quite often due to its aggressive memory use (not by size, but for alloc/free, though much less expensive and large than Firefox's, and also related with things that Windows doesn't like). Now after many bugfixes it behaves very stable with more than 100 pages opened on windoze machine with 256MB RAM. This shows that developers did learn how to solve those memory issues.

Sadly I cannot say this about Firefox, which eats a lot more memory and is totally unusable with many pages opened on the same machine with 256 MB RAM and slow 20G HDD with dynamic swap (it's windoze "feature").

It's very sad that MoFo/MoCo devs have inmpoving/fixing Gecko on the bottom of they todo list.

cactus · 2006-12-14 16:43:47

firefox2 runs quite a bit better on windows than it does on Linux.

*mumbles about having to use windows at work*

stonecrest · 2006-12-14 19:43:02

Romashka wrote:

It's very sad that MoFo/MoCo devs have inmpoving/fixing Gecko on the bottom of they todo list.

I realize you really like opera (hence the reason you need to criticize firefox in every firefox-related thread), but this is downright trolling. Just look at the recent firefox changes, pretty much the ONLY changes in it were backend changes.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/arch … ko_19.html
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko:Reflow_Refactoring
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/tor/arch … d_svg.html

Romashka · 2006-12-15 21:03:28

stonecrest wrote:

Romashka wrote:
It's very sad that MoFo/MoCo devs have inmpoving/fixing Gecko on the bottom of they todo list.
I realize you really like opera

Yes, because I have reasons for that. I don't see a problem here.

stonecrest wrote:

(hence the reason you need to criticize firefox in every firefox-related thread), but this is downright trolling.

I don't criticize Firefox because I like Opera. Period!
I use Firefox too (on my Xfce/GTK-only server and on Windows for testing web pages in it).
And I do like some ideas in it, and some plugins. So I'm not a troll.
I just want Firefox to be better than it is now (IMHO).

I know that you really like Firefox (hence the reason you need to glorify firefox in every firefox-related thread) (that's a troll sentence really )

stonecrest wrote:

Just look at the recent firefox changes, pretty much the ONLY changes in it were backend changes.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/arch … ko_19.html
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko:Reflow_Refactoring
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/tor/arch … d_svg.html

I do know about this, but this is too late and to slow development IMHO.
I want to see more like this instead of silly advertisements about "new" "features" in Firefox.
Gecko is good engine, but it needs more attention (code cleanup and bug fixes).
I am really impressed by recent improvements in KHTML/WebKit, Presto (Opera's engine) and Prince (HTML to PDF rendering engine), while Gecko is still behind them (which was not the case few years ago when main development was done on Mozilla Suite).

So stop thinking about me as just "Opera lover" and "Firefox (Gecko) hater". This is simply not true. Period.

linuxinit · 2006-12-27 09:52:02

We all know firefox is bloated, big news. I want somebody to use the gecko engine in a clean tiny gtk interface with decent customization allowed. Ephiphany and Galeon are both just weird. All I want is a tabbed browser with a single close tab button, adblocker, javascript blocker, and the gecko engine. What would be really cool is if somebody writes a wrapper for various html rendering engines so you could drop in, say, IE6, IE7, and a few other rendering dls/libraries and have it run on standard GTK.

One can dream...

chrismortimore · 2006-12-27 11:11:04

I'm liking Konqueror just now, all the fun of Firefox, but quicker. And for pages that don't work, I have a nice "Open in Firefox" menu item

deficite · 2006-12-27 16:19:45

I'm actually really enjoying IE7. It's interface is really nice and is actually innovative (although, it is a tad Operaish)

Romashka · 2006-12-27 19:48:53

deficite wrote:

I'm actually really enjoying IE7. It's interface is really nice and is actually innovative

Kidding?

linuxinit · 2006-12-27 22:12:07

Hahaha...

Damnshock · 2006-12-28 01:17:09

Romashka wrote:

Kidding?

Isn't it obvious? Of course he's not!!!

chaosgeisterchen · 2006-12-28 02:11:51

deficite wrote:

I'm actually really enjoying IE7. It's interface is really nice and is actually innovative (although, it is a tad Operaish)

Sounds serious. Could you point out to me what you find innovative concerning Internet Explorer 7, I never really investigated the new features and am curious about what is actually innovative and not (as it is often critizised) only copied from either Firefox or Opera?

Concerning web browsers I like to use Konqueror whenever I have the possibility to do so. It's a very nice browser although it's dead slow at some point.

arooaroo · 2006-12-28 10:59:23

I struggle to see how it's interface is innovative - it's a bit different, for sure, but it doesn't take you to a new level or anything. I've been using it a fair bit, and it's certainly now a decent browser, but it's basically on par with FF and Opera. Each have their own strengths and weaknesses, but ultimately there's not a lot in it.

phrakture · 2006-12-28 16:35:04

arooaroo wrote:

I struggle to see how it's interface is innovative - it's a bit different, for sure, but it doesn't take you to a new level or anything. I've been using it a fair bit, and it's certainly now a decent browser, but it's basically on par with FF and Opera. Each have their own strengths and weaknesses, but ultimately there's not a lot in it.

Actually, I'd agree it is a bit "innovative", though, to me that says nothing about "right or wrong". They tried to move buttons and things around based on usage and importance. I don't know if they hit the mark, but at least they tried to move away from the browser-paradigm that's been in use for ages now.

Romashka · 2006-12-28 20:17:20

phrakture wrote:

Actually, I'd agree it is a bit "innovative", though, to me that says nothing about "right or wrong". They tried to move buttons and things around based on usage and importance. I don't know if they hit the mark, but at least they tried to move away from the browser-paradigm that's been in use for ages now.

It may be "innovative" for M$ but not for browser. It has no useful "innovations" that Opera or Safari or iCab or Netscape8 or ... don't have.

BTW, do you know that M$ is going to "license" its "ribbon" interface.
And how they are gonna to force licensing now, when there are some programs with this interface already available now.

bones · 2006-12-28 20:39:46

BTW, do you know that M$ is going to "license" its "ribbon" interface.
And how they are gonna to force licensing now, when there are some programs with this interface already available now.

Easy buy'em out with cash or scare them into dropping it with the threat of dragging it through the courts, In this day and age it's not what's right or moral it's who's got the money that wins by dragging it out for as long as possible until the other party is financially ruined.

daedalusman · 2006-12-28 21:40:59

bones wrote:

Easy buy'em out with cash or scare them into dropping it with the threat of dragging it through the courts, In this day and age it's not what's right or moral it's who's got the money that wins by dragging it out for as long as possible until the other party is financially ruined.

You do realize that that has always been the way of things since the first of idea of currency came about. Its not like Microsoft was the first company to be immoral with its business practices.

iphitus · 2006-12-28 21:58:49

bones wrote:

BTW, do you know that M$ is going to "license" its "ribbon" interface.
And how they are gonna to force licensing now, when there are some programs with this interface already available now.
Easy buy'em out with cash or scare them into dropping it with the threat of dragging it through the courts, In this day and age it's not what's right or moral it's who's got the money that wins by dragging it out for as long as possible until the other party is financially ruined.

Ribbon interface wasnt invented by microsoft, it's nothing new.

Open bluefish, and countless other html editors and development software. There's a tabbed toolbar up there. At heart, ribbon is the same thing with just one or two things -- and that's not an innovation.

An innovation is something new and unseen, taking something old and modifying it slightly isn't an innovation -- if it were, then every release of every software app is an innovation.

James

Romashka · 2006-12-29 19:32:30

iphitus wrote:

Ribbon interface wasnt invented by microsoft, it's nothing new.

IIRC they even patented stuff like doubleclick or Alt-Tab, so this is not unusual for them.

Arch Linux

#1 2006-12-10 17:04:41

a possible explanation why firefox is bloated

#2 2006-12-10 21:49:42

Re: a possible explanation why firefox is bloated

#3 2006-12-10 22:29:20

Re: a possible explanation why firefox is bloated

#4 2006-12-12 20:43:50

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#5 2006-12-13 01:45:16

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#6 2006-12-13 15:46:30

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#7 2006-12-13 20:26:23

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#8 2006-12-14 14:21:23

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#9 2006-12-14 16:43:47

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#10 2006-12-14 19:43:02

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#11 2006-12-15 21:03:28

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#12 2006-12-27 09:52:02

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#13 2006-12-27 11:11:04

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#14 2006-12-27 16:19:45

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#15 2006-12-27 19:48:53

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#16 2006-12-27 22:12:07

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#17 2006-12-28 01:17:09

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#18 2006-12-28 02:11:51

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#19 2006-12-28 10:59:23

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#20 2006-12-28 16:35:04

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#21 2006-12-28 20:17:20

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#22 2006-12-28 20:39:46

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#23 2006-12-28 21:40:59

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#24 2006-12-28 21:58:49

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#25 2006-12-29 19:32:30

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