Buffy Posted April 19, 2005 Report Share Posted April 19, 2005 We're seeing a slow but steady drop in IE percentage on web stats. Hopefully the Mozilla folks won't lose it though. I've had a horrible time with FF 1.02: lots of bugs and on the dozen systems I tested its MUCH slower that 1.01. I upgraded to 1.03 as soon as it was available, and its better but that was a sad experience. Lots of complaints on 1.02 showed up on various forums, although I've been too busy to read too much of it. Prolly some bad code introduced by an open source contributor! :) Cheers,Buffy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buffy Posted April 19, 2005 Report Share Posted April 19, 2005 Oh and I just finished an RFI from a reallyreallyreally big company and while they made it clear that the solution had to run on IE, the asked about a 10 questions to make absolutely *certain* that NO ActiveX or Java Applets were required. Cheers,Buffy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alexander Posted April 19, 2005 Author Report Share Posted April 19, 2005 Lots of complaints on 1.02 showed up on various forums, although I've been too busy to read too much of it. I agree, i've been seeing a lot of unnecessary and unprecedented cpu activity with .02, up to 7% when it was supposed to be idle, i agree that it wasnt great, but i think that many problems got fixed in .03 (seen security patches, as well as patches to the main program, so so far, not had many problems with .03)P.S. have you submitted any bugs in the bug report forums Buffy, if not you should start considering it, it will greatly help out the devs, you know how hard it is to find minor flaws in your own code, helpful if someone says oh, i was here and i clicked on this and it did this and i got this will put you well on your way to better code...P.P.S. i think that the major problem is that the new people write patches that interfear with certain things in the engine (written by that 17 year old genius coder kid) (just like any patch, some might not be as stable as others, so what can improve performance you my computer, in certain circomstances will cause your system to not be responsive (+ if you are running Firefox in windows it could be that some win patches are interfearing with Firefox performance (M$ does not like firefox)) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
C1ay Posted April 20, 2005 Report Share Posted April 20, 2005 While I love the performance and features Firefox offers I must admit, it is a hugh memory hog. It's not uncommon to find that Firefox has between 50 and 100mb tied up if it's open for a while. Then again, I have been known to open 20 to 30 windows at a time :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buffy Posted April 20, 2005 Report Share Posted April 20, 2005 My other beef with FF is that it seems to be single-threaded. I've never looked at the code, but it seems to have been dumbed down, and I suspect it has to do with the fact that the threading models on Windows and *nix are different, and the original designers decided to punt rather than abstract it. If I've got a lot of work to do, I still use IE for this reason alone.... Cheers,Buffy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alexander Posted April 20, 2005 Author Report Share Posted April 20, 2005 You really gotta run Firefox in its home environment...P.S. while you may see that firefox uses more resources than IE, you have to realise that more than a half of IE is hidden within Explorer, so you only have brief reference point of how much resources it actually uses. But yeah, the windows port is not the greatest i agree, but its not mozillas fault, it is Microsofts oh, we are going to standardise this already standardised protocol the Microsoft way, can anyone explain to me why M$ redefines standards set by the International Standards Organisations, people who get paid to research and come up with standards based on how much they make sense not, oh we will change this so that program is no longer compattible with windows, and thus these people will have to use our bloated proprietary program that will cost them $500 and have all kinds of features that these people will never have a need in, instead of this open and free program that does the basics that most people need? Hey Buffy, so are you going to write a patch to make Firefox miltithreaded under windows? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buffy Posted April 20, 2005 Report Share Posted April 20, 2005 You really gotta run Firefox in its home environment...So you're saying its really only for *nix? :)while you may see that firefox uses more resources than IE...Oh on the contrary, its clear it uses *less* resources, and that in addition to the plug-ins (I live by the Venkman javascript debugger plugin) makes it my primary browser for development (although I've got all the others lying around for testing!). My only complaint was whatever happened in 1.02 (1.03 does seem "fixed"), and the multi-threading issue, which appears to have been punted on on *all* platforms, which is my complaint:Hey Buffy, so are you going to write a patch to make Firefox miltithreaded under windows?Me? I like to get paid (money, food, etc) for coding! :) But the real issue is that it looks like the code made no accomodation for multi-threading at all, but they still force single instance on windows. This is an architectural issue that can't be "patched"... Cheers,Buffy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alexander Posted April 20, 2005 Author Report Share Posted April 20, 2005 Not a coder by soul huh? you can write them a letter and make sure that they are aware of the countless improvements, avtually i wonder if they started working on firefox 2.0... :)i think that under unix this issue has been solved by forking exec, those of you that run unix-based oses can see that if you do "ps -ef f" you will se multiple firefox ececutables running, but there is only one real process. There's not been too much multithreading support in unix apps, but it would make it all a bit faster, so if you want to, lead the way Bufy... :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buffy Posted April 20, 2005 Report Share Posted April 20, 2005 i think that under unix this issue has been solved by forking exec, those of you that run unix-based oses can see that if you do "ps -ef f" you will se multiple firefox ececutables running, but there is only one real process.No my impression is that on Unix it does indeed simply open up a separate process, which is the default in the operating system. There's no "one real process" if its showing up as separate ones in ps. The issue under windows is that when you fire up an executable, the os goes around looking for the same program and if it finds it it says "you're being started again" and the process can ignore it or it can open another instance of itself. When that second instance is opened, you have to explicitly have code to create multiple threads, or it all runs out of the same process space. The advantage of this is that it conserves resources, and on unix all those firefox processes start piling up in memory, so its less efficient. The right way to do this is to build an abstraction of the threading calls so that on either system it does take all startups and new window/tab requests as a request to start a separate thread. The calls are way different on each system, but you can abstract it out, hoever it does take some heavy reorganization and rethinking of the code architecture to handle this at all.There's not been too much multithreading support in unix apps, but it would make it all a bit faster, so if you want to, lead the way Bufy... :)Huh? I've been writing them *forever*... you really can't build a server application without it! They're not that hard to build, you just have to learn how to *think* multithreaded. There are even languages like Ada that can do a lot of the overhead for you.... Buffy sez check it out.... Cheers,Buffy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alexander Posted April 21, 2005 Author Report Share Posted April 21, 2005 Huh? I've been writing them *forever*... you really can't build a server application without it! They're not that hard to build, you just have to learn how to *think* multithreaded. There are even languages like Ada that can do a lot of the overhead for you.... Thats awesome, i could use a few pointers from you, and just aside, you are only one of tens if not hundreds of thousands of programmers that write code for unix-like oses, and most of them dont pay too much attention to multithreading... Server apps, really, do you know if apache is multithreaded? It could be just me, apache does a whole lot of exec forking, i guess it could be multithreaded also... windows is that when you fire up an executable, the os goes around looking for the same program and if it finds it it says "you're being started again" and the process can ignore it or it can open another instance of itself.what a dumb os? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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