[geeks] Replacement MacBook question

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Sep 8, 2008, at 13:01 , Joshua Boyd wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 08, 2008 at 12:36:55PM -0400, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>
>> I can't go back to Firefox 2, because it leaks memory until it dies  
>> on
>> my machine.
>>
>> F3 so far has never done that, which is worth a lot when you depend  
>> on
>> the browser for local documentation and other things.
>
> FF3 has proven to leak memory as well, just not as much.  I've seen it
> taking 1.5 gigs, then when I killed it and reloaded with the same 30
> tabs, it only took 300megs.

I knew it still leaked, but so far I've not seen it do the balloon- 
leaking like earlier versions.

I frequently use a lot of tabs too.

I wonder why FF will work on one setup and not another sometimes, when  
each often has similar browsing patterns?

> Plus sometimes it just gets stupid, even when it isn't out of memory,
> taking minutes to redraw the screen, or just doing nothing at all but
> eaching CPU (visibly.  Obviously it is trying to something, but I have
> no idea what).  Sometimes when it has trouble, it is presumably
> thrashing, but other times it does this when the memory usage is  
> really
> low.

I've not see this at all.

Could be related to which add-ons each of us uses.

I did reduce a lot of my add-ons last year so maybe I just don't run  
enough to see this as much.

> I still think FF3 is an improvement over FF2.  It is much easier to
> restart it with confidence for instance.  Still it is a pretty  
> miserable
> situation.

Yeah... they all suck.  It's a matter of suck reduction more than  
anything else.

> I am really looking forward to trying Chrome on Linux as soon as they
> can possibly make it.

I've tried it on Windows and it's a mixed bag.

Very fast, but it crashes often.

One of the bragging points was that each tab was a separate process,  
and no page crash could bring down the rest of your tabs.

I find just the opposite: it's quite easy for a problem with one  
"process" to kill the entire Chrome browser.

Maybe it's just early growing pains.


-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com