[SLL] Laughing down Firefox today at my work...

[John Locke]

Glenn Stone wrote:
>
> Oh, and one more thing?  TabMixPlus's session manager for the win.  That
> makes it decidedly less annoying (and darn near painless) to have to
> restart, even if it's kill -9.  And, got a whole buttload of tabs whose
> content you want to remember but it's eating your box alive?  Move them to
> their own window, save'em off, and kill the window.  Winner!  
>
>   
Haven't tried that one, but I do use the SessionSaver extension, which
sounds quite similar.

I regularly have 3-4 Firefox windows open, each with anywhere from 4 -
30 tabs. Or at least I used to. On Ubuntu, with the sites I keep open
all the time (including some JS-heavy internal sites), it used to
regularly consume 800-900MB of RAM, out of the 1.5GB I have on my Thinkpad.

Now I just store a few strategic sessions: one for the big development
project I'm working on, one for the streamlined set of business
operations, and one with all the tabs opened to the stories/pages I'm
reading. You can switch between them pretty easily, and Session Saver
opens/closes windows and tabs to restore whatever session you switch to.
I've noticed that other than my surfing session, Firefox uses much less
memory (down to 300MB on most of my sessions), and Session Saver manages
to free a lot of the runaway memory leaks I used to see, so that I'm
really only having to shut down Firefox once or twice a week.


I think two add-ons are most responsible for the problems I see: Flash,
and Firebug. Flash is the worst, but Session Saver saves me from having
to kill Firefox after every time I visit a YouTube page or one of those
sites with too many flash ads. Firebug I have configured to only be
active on designated sites, but it still gets confused sometimes in my
Dojo-heavy code and only gets back to normal after restarting Firefox.
I'm also seeing a couple of other weird behavior related to this, with
context menus getting messed up and a few other quirky events that
apparently are related to deep bugs in the Gecko code base, fixed in FF3.

I did download and try FF3, (before I ran Session Saver) and was quite
impressed with its speed and memory usage. It felt much snappier, and
handled the ~30 some tabs I had open very well. But since I'm in the
middle of a big project using the Dojo Toolkit, there are some crucial
things not working yet for FF3, or I would still be using it... can't
wait for it to stabilize and for the major toolkits to support it!

Cheers,
John Locke
http://www.freelock.com