[wplug] Firefox is too bloated (bookmark insanity)

[Tom Rhodes]

On Sun, 11 Nov 2007 02:17:49 -0500
Zach <netrek at gmail.com> wrote:

> Speaking anecdotally I've observed Firefox to run slower and slower
> with each new release! Not only does it eat up insane amounts of
> physical memory but I regularly see in htop it spiking my CPU to 100%
> utilization. I'm using iceweasel which is a debianized installation of
> firefox and I'm seriously thinking about looking for a new browser.
> Can anyone recommend a Linux browser which meets the following
> requirements:
> 
> * support window tabs
> * full CSS2 and earlier support
> * good flash support
> * conforms to W3C standards as closely as possible
> * does not hog the memory or cpu (lighter footprint the better!)
> 
> Another annoying thing is that I remember when Firefox had nice clean
> bookmarks, now when I go to edit my bookmark file in Emacs I see all
> this superfluous stuff that takes a lot of time to remove. Here is one
> gem I recently noticed in my bookmarks file:
> 

Are you building with any optimizations?  I think firefox has
always used insane amounts of memory:

last pid:  2461;  load averages:  0.00,  0.02,  0.01                                      up 0+08:26:31  03:09:18
52 processes:  1 running, 51 sleeping
CPU states:  0.8% user,  0.0% nice,  0.8% system,  4.3% interrupt, 94.2% idle
Mem: 178M Active, 388M Inact, 200M Wired, 1652K Cache, 109M Buf, 205M Free
Swap: 2048M Total, 2048M Free

  PID USERNAME    THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE  C   TIME   WCPU COMMAND
  820 trhodes       1  44    0   356M 79828K select 0   3:18  0.00% Xorg        <<
  872 trhodes       1  44    0 56780K 29524K select 0   2:49  0.00% pidgin
  883 trhodes       7  44    0   113M 95028K ucond  0   2:42  0.00% firefox-bin <<
  847 trhodes       1  44    0 25700K 13332K select 0   0:14  0.00% xfce4-panel
  752 root          1  44    0  3256K   972K select 1   0:06  0.00% moused
  829 trhodes       1  44    0  5968K  3740K select 1   0:05  0.00% xscreensaver
  860 trhodes       1  44    0 14360K 10424K select 1   0:05  0.00% sylpheed

Insane, seriously.  You can probably pass gcc -O2 (and deal with
stupid GCC opts) which may help.  You may also want to try
removing all of your current firefox settings (if you did an
upgrade).

If you're going to switch browsers though, there have been a
few good things said about Opera.  None of those things
has been fully evaluated by myself, of course.

-- 
Tom Rhodes