Some Open Source Disapppointments

firefox.gif

I regret to say that the standard bearers of open source on your desktop, Firefox browser and OpenOffice.org both have important flaws. Firefox has dreadful memory hunger. Have a look at how it’s chewing up resources on my own system (above) though I guess I can forgive it it’s trespasses against me because it only displays this characteristic when opening many tabs at once something that Microsoft Internet Explorer won’t even do. Still it’s a pity. (It also amazes me that Microsoft hasn’t released a small facelifted update of IE with (what I find) the most useful feature of Firefox that IE doesn’t have those tabs for viewing many pages within the one browser window.

OpenOffice.org seems to have a similar flaw taking far longer for instance to open spreadsheets than Excel. I read this on some update from Slashdot some time ago but didn’t keep the link no doubt it will yield to a Google search.

But it’s sad since both of these products have just had major new releases. Let’s hope they get it right in subsequent releases.

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Aidan
Aidan
2024 years ago

I think it is a memory leak rather than just being bloated. I find I have to shut Firefox down periodically as it starts to hog more and more resources.

You know it is a leak when you shut down all your windows and the program is taking more memory than it did when it started up. Memory has been allocated but not subsequently deallocated.

No biggie. It is still a nice browser, but it would be great if they fixed this.

Cheers

Aidan

Tony.T
2024 years ago

Totally agree, Nick. I also have a little problem with FF in that when I click on a site with a flash component, I lose the little black marker that tell you where your next letter is to be typed. (The cursor?) But, yep, it’s the tabs that eat up the memory, and it’s amazing IE haven’t nicked the idea.

Nicholas
Nicholas
2024 years ago

It may also be related to the number of windows/tabs open. An equivalent number of IE windows would chew a whole lot of memory also..

Nicholas
Nicholas
2024 years ago

please remove my email link from the comment above. I had no idea your site would publish it! Please remove it ASAP before I get a mountain of spam. Thanks.

Albatross2147
Albatross2147
2024 years ago

Yerr I bin using FF since the get go and haven’t had any issues with whatsoever. The only way to improve it would be to have “mouse gestures” and the ability to remember where you were as per Opera (I have both running concurrently almost all the time).

It must be all the errr… adult interest sites you guys visit that is causing the grief. Or you could buy some more RAM.

jt
jt
2024 years ago

Albatross,

I highly recommend the Mouse Gestures extension for FF. It provides exactly the kind of functionality that Opera has had for a while. I also make use of Adblock and just recently discovered “Tab Preview” (http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla/tabpreview/).

Nicholas Gruen
2024 years ago

Nicholas,

Sorry that the email is published – old software which is being sorted I believe. But the email address you gave was spam@spam.com – so I think you’re safe.

Nicholas
Nicholas
2024 years ago

someone else must have edited it. It was … just kidding! Thanks!!

Ken Parish
Ken Parish
2024 years ago

Yes, I admit it, it was me. I noticed your second comment and, being a victim of vast quantities of spam myself from a short period when I stupidly included my CDU email address on bnlog comments, I decided to edit without reference to Nicholas G. We’re soon going to move across to brand new blog premises with upgraded spam protection. I’d better make sure that commenters’ email addresses are not displayed.