Firefox 4.0 Observations

[Detonate]

I installed FF 4.0 from the ppa. Thought I would play around with it around see what it had to offer. The first thing I discovered sent me back to chromium. CPU usage was intolerable. I first noticed that my CPU temp was climbing. It jumped up to 40° C. It usually runs under 30° C. Ran top and found FF was using 67& of my CPU and the plugin container was eating most of the remaining. This is with streaming radio running flash. In chromium the exact same web page with the exact same radio stream in flash uses 27%. Just an observation. YMMV.

[dibl]

Re: Firefox 4.0 Observations

Thanks -- you saved me the time and bother!

[wizard10000]

Re: Firefox 4.0 Observations

I've pretty much given up on FF. It's gotten way too fat for my taste and the Windows version has way more vulnerabilities than IE - and on Linux it just blows chunks. I ran Chrome unstable for awhile which was a little too bleeding edge for me and settled on Chromium.

The only time I've absolutely had to use FF in the last year was to file my taxes and since TurboTax' website is flash-based it shouldn't matter which browser you run - but it refused to run on Chrome last year, saying it was unsupported. This year I'm gonna try Chromium with a user agent switcher.

[oshunluvr]

Re: Firefox 4.0 Observations

Interesting, I'm using 4.0 "Minefield" and getting daily updates. It's way faster than 3.5 and although there was an issue or two at the beginning, it's seems stable and way faster for me now.

I love the Tab Pinning feature and Sync is awesome. Although fast, I could never get enough out of chrome (hated the start up tile thing too) and Opera? talk about bloated....

Each to his own though -

BEHOLD THE BEAUTY AND WONDER OF LINUX!!!

[claydoh]

Re: Firefox 4.0 Observations

heck, I find 4.0 alpha9 in Natty to feel fast enough that I have switched to it from rekonq, my previous fave browser. On my P4-M 2.0ghz/1gb ram ancient and crusty laptop, it is very satisfying to use as compared to 3.x firefox.

KDE 4.6 in natty as well as ff4 feel like they use somewhat less ram/cpu than in maverick, at least for me.

I still want a dual core laptop, though: I WANT MY BLUR EFFECT/CUBE !!!!
Gotta start saving my nickels and dimes.

[Snowhog]

Re: Firefox 4.0 Observations

The blur effect is not activated here. Tried it, and it does work, but it slows things down, and CPU useage goes up. I'm happy with transparency.

[toad]

Re: Firefox 4.0 Observations

I still want a dual core laptop, though: I WANT MY BLUR EFFECT/CUBE !!!!
Gotta start saving my nickels and dimes.

Yep, same here! My trusty old T41 does the trick with openbox and compiz but energy efficiency is something else. I am now eyeing up a rather cheap T61 - not the T61p which is still pricey 'cos of its graphic capabilities (but why have 1900x1200 without an hdmi port). A normal T61 with 1440x900 can be had for €350 and I bet a lot less in the States.

Oh, and sorry for the hijack

EDIT:
LXDE and compiz work just fine on my 1600 single core with 1GB RAM

[gjartin]

Re: Firefox 4.0 Observations

I first noticed that my CPU temp was climbing. It jumped up to 40° C. It usually runs under 30° C. Ran top and found FF was using 67& of my CPU and the plugin container was eating most of the remaining. This is with streaming radio running flash.

I was very surprised by this. I've been running FF 4b9 for several days, and it works (and with the new tabs, also looks!) great.
While running streaming radio on the BBC player in the background, I experienced quite varying CPU loads (30 - 60%, compared with 30 - 35 without the player), but there was no noticeable difference of CPU temp (around 30C). At the same time, I've been running a big file copying job, which obviously explains a bit of the load.

[Detonate]

Re: Firefox 4.0 Observations

There were some updates to FF this morning. I'll check it later and post back with any changes.

[Detonate]

Re: Firefox 4.0 Observations

OK, further experimentation indicates that flash is what is causing the high cpu usage. Actually it is the FF implemntation of flash, because the same web site, using the same flash plugin in chromium, does not cause high cpu usage. Interesting.

[gjartin]

Re: Firefox 4.0 Observations

OK, further experimentation indicates that flash is what is causing the high cpu usage. Actually it is the FF implemntation of flash, because the same web site, using the same flash plugin in chromium, does not cause high cpu usage. Interesting.

This doesn't really explain the differences, compared with my observations. The BBC player is a Flash application.
I've been running 4b9 quite heavily during the evening as well (it's evening in Sweden), during somewhat different circumstances compared with earlier: still doing heavy file copying, no flash, but continuously plyaing songs on Amarok. CPU temp has gone up a couple of degrees, CPU load about the same as before.
For me, FF 4b9 actually works just fine!

[Detonate]

Re: Firefox 4.0 Observations

Last night's updates seem to have had some effect. The same web site and the same flash streaming radio is not causing nearly as much abuse of cpu resources today.

[gjartin]

Re: Firefox 4.0 Observations

That sounds great!

[axel668]

Re: Firefox 4.0 Observations

Using FF4 since about Beta 6 - however I downloaded it directly from the Mozilla FTP site, and not from the Ubuntu PPA. Since about Beta 8 it's very stable and much faster than FF 3.5, in fact speedwise it feels much like Google Chrome (although I didn't run any benchmarks to confirm this impression.

[gjartin]

Re: Firefox 4.0 Observations

Seen som VERY strange effects since b11 - it looks like the Firefox windows are losing tiny bits of text (and graphics). like wet paper!
Still not sure if it's only FF, though, or if it's related to kde.

Edit: It also seems like b4 uses a lot of memory - 150 Mb with 5 tabs in use. I don't know what the previous betas have used, but FF 3.6.13 with the same 5 tabs uses only 85 Mb.

Further edit: Haven't seen at all today, in spite of quite heavy use. Maybe hardware related?