How your computer operating system kills your computer

[The Succubus]

Well, I'm always happy listen to the voice of experience in these matters. The new computer I'm getting (it's an upgrade from my faithful little Alienware M17) has an Nvidia GTX 670 card. Part of the reason I went for Nvidia (aside from the craptastic performance of the two ATI 3870 mobility cards in my current laptop) is because they have Linux compatible drivers. Are these woefully poor as well?

As I mentioned in my previous post, Linux will be a secondary OS on my new computer with it's own hard drive. I am (albeit with great reluctance) having Windows 7 installed on a 128Gb SSD with a third hard drive for game storage.

Linux will be an alternative boot used for experimentation and disaster recovery if my main OS goes pear shaped.

[Rawhide]

Well, to be clear, it's not that I recommend people don't use Firefox, just that if asked for a recommendation, it won't be Firefox.

Lets start with the basics - OS supplied browsers.

The latest IE and Safari are both fine browsers. Both are lacking a bit in third party customisation support. Safari is lacking in a "reopen closed tab" feature - the one thing I really miss when I use Safari.


Then there are the other major third party browser alternatives.

Opera I haven't really tested. It's installed, but I haven't given it much thought yet. However, it looks like it might be a fine alternative.

Chrome has some nice features, but I'm not at all a fan of its "phone home" and tracking features - all of which are on by default and some of which can't be disabled - or the very dodgy practices thay have used in the install routine.


And one minor one.

SRWare Iron. A Chrome clone, built from the open source Chromium code base. It seeks to remove all of the phone home and similar features that Google uses, while still providing you with as identical an experience as possible. One major drawback... I think they went too far with the removal of automatic updates. I think that should be included, with system prompting you as you first install it to ask if you want it on or off (default option highlighted should be to check, then notify and ask to install).


---


None of them are perfect, but that's the state of play as it is currently. If you are diligent about checking for manual updates, I'd suggest you check out Iron.

[nedz]

I turned off automatic updates after a couple of bad experiences.

We were running a customer acceptance test at work which required that we run a new version of our software and demonstrate that it would be stable (ie not crash) if we left it running for 5x24. Four days in Windows update rebooted the test server.

I was using my machine at home when suddenly everything closes down and the machine reboots. Reason: Windows update. The standard procedure is to throw up a dialog box to at least tell the user that this is going to happen, and ideally give them the option of delaying the restart — not microsoft !

I now do the required updates manually.

[factotum]

Trixie, I'm guessing you haven't used Linux in at least five years or so? Because a modern Linux distro is nothing like as painful to set up and use as you're making out. As for 3D performance being bad, there are tests that show some OpenGL-based games (e.g. virtually anything by id software) actually run faster on Linux than they do on Windows!

(And I'll point out that I have no axe to grind here--I use Windows on my main machine because I play games on it, and Windows still gets more of those than Linux does; however, this is generally because the target audience of a Linux game is so low, not because of any deficiencies in the OS when it comes to running games).

[Rawhide]

I turned off automatic updates after a couple of bad experiences.

We were running a customer acceptance test at work which required that we run a new version of our software and demonstrate that it would be stable (ie not crash) if we left it running for 5x24. Four days in Windows update rebooted the test server.

I was using my machine at home when suddenly everything closes down and the machine reboots. Reason: Windows update. The standard procedure is to throw up a dialog box to at least tell the user that this is going to happen, and ideally give them the option of delaying the restart — not microsoft !

I now do the required updates manually.

Then you have Windows Update configured incorrectly. I have mine set to check, then notify for download and install. This is also the way that all servers should be configured (maybe allow automatic download on some servers, but always prompt to install). In business, we set the workstations to download from SUS/WSUS, install, then prompt to manually restart.

[Trixie]

Well, I'm always happy listen to the voice of experience in these matters. The new computer I'm getting (it's an upgrade from my faithful little Alienware M17) has an Nvidia GTX 670 card. Part of the reason I went for Nvidia (aside from the craptastic performance of the two ATI 3870 mobility cards in my current laptop) is because they have Linux compatible drivers. Are these woefully poor as well?

In my experience, even medium range cards never had good Linux drivers. Top line? Pfft, when I was using Linux the forums were full of advice like 'do not buy anything above XXXX card, it already is too fast so you overpay".

It might have changed a bit now, but frankly, the only graphic drivers ever cared for were for gaming/professional systems, and even MacOs barely qualifies for that.

Linux will be an alternative boot used for experimentation and disaster recovery if my main OS goes pear shaped.

You can do that far better using bootable Linux DVD/Pendrive and using that HDD for Windows backups...

Generally poor support for Mac users.

Not using Mac, but ok.

The automatic updater sometimes decides to do an upgrade, whether you like it or not, even if you instruct it that you do not want to perform that upgrade. Yes, I was delaying an upgrade on a particular PC for development reasons, yes, this did happen to me.

Never happened to me, but ok.

It's an absolute memory hog. Leave it running any decent amount of time with any reasonable amount of tabs open and it starts to slow things right down. Heck, it happens even on one tab. Not just the browser window, the entire computer. This is by design, not a memory leak or other bug.

Um... I happen to have 350+ tabs opened regularly (don't ask, need them). Barely notice any slowdowns, current amount of memory taken - 1.7 GB, less than half. And good, I didn't bought it to stay empty. But why it is downside? Win 7 has pretty good memory management, when I want to play, say, TF2, most of that 1.7 GB lands on readyboost SD card, memory is free again and everything functions well, on pretty old PC. Unless you need more than that opened at a time, I don't see how it is resource hog?

The interface, while still quite usable, has not improved, but unimproved (yes, I did check that word in the dictionary, because it didn't feel right).

Standard one, yes, though minimal interface is pretty good, and you can remodel everything with plugins. That's the major strength of FF, unlike other browsers, I can fix what I don't like.

Well, to be clear, it's not that I recommend people don't use Firefox, just that if asked for a recommendation, it won't be Firefox.

That's the problem:

Lets start with the basics - OS supplied browsers.

Non-customizable, by far the easiest to be broken into.

Opera I haven't really tested. It's installed, but I haven't given it much thought yet. However, it looks like it might be a fine alternative.

Slow, much less customizable than FF. I tried it.

Chrome has some nice features, but I'm not at all a fan of its "phone home" and tracking features - all of which are on by default and some of which can't be disabled - or the very dodgy practices thay have used in the install routine.

Yes, it has tons of spyware, and doesn't offer anything better than FF, if anything, less.

A Chrome clone

I'm not fan of the clones of FF/Chrome/Opera as they tend to be updated less frequently, have far less plugins, and you never know what replaced all these pesky things cut from original, if it wasn't something much worse.

FF might not be as good as it was, but it still has by far the most plugins, and I actually do like new sans-menu-bar interface. That's the best thing about it, you don't like something in the interface? 15 min in .ini file or just download right plugin, and it's instantly tailored to you.

The standard procedure is to throw up a dialog box to at least tell the user that this is going to happen, and ideally give them the option of delaying the restart

Um, that is exactly what it does for me?

Though, I admit, it restarted once for me when I wandered off the PC and 25 min countdown period passed. Wasn't too happy.

Trixie, I'm guessing you haven't used Linux in at least five years or so? Because a modern Linux distro is nothing like as painful to set up and use as you're making out.

I did. But, you know, my school required older, stable and tested distribution. Yes, I am aware new ones are flashy, but I really see no reason to complicate my life when other OS just work better.

OpenGL-based games (e.g. virtually anything by id software) actually run faster on Linux than they do on Windows!

A) name number of OpenGL games that were released in say, last 3 years. B) name number of patches compared to windows version linux games get.

Synthetic tests are not everything, and even if they were, I'll gladly take half FPS drop in one game I don't even play to use all the thousands of others.

[Rawhide]

Um... I happen to have 350+ tabs opened regularly (don't ask, need them). Barely notice any slowdowns, current amount of memory taken - 1.7 GB, less than half. And good, I didn't bought it to stay empty. But why it is downside? Win 7 has pretty good memory management, when I want to play, say, TF2, most of that 1.7 GB lands on readyboost SD card, memory is free again and everything functions well, on pretty old PC. Unless you need more than that opened at a time, I don't see how it is resource hog?

As mentioned, this can and does happen on as little as 1 tab currently open. Generally between 3 to 7, sometimes up to 15. It slows down to the point that it is completely unusable until the application is closed and restarted. Running on various i7 based computers with 4GB+ RAM, all versions since 2.x.

Standard one, yes, though minimal interface is pretty good, and you can remodel everything with plugins. That's the major strength of FF, unlike other browsers, I can fix what I don't like.

The standard one is terrible, and that is what most people will be using. They should design an actually decent interface, or revert back to the better one they had previously.

You can also customise the interface of other browsers. It may not be as obvious, but the options and addins are there.

Non-customizable,

Yes, customisable.

by far the easiest to be broken into.

Please check your facts before you perpetuate such completely false myths. I'm sorry, but by stating the security falsehood as fact, you have put a major dint in your credibility. There is absolutely nothing wrong with security, as long as you keep them up to date (just as with any browser).

Slow, much less customizable than FF. I tried it.

Slow? Most reviews place Opera amongst the fastest, or as the fastest.

I'm not fan of the clones of FF/Chrome/Opera as they tend to be updated less frequently, have far less plugins, and you never know what replaced all these pesky things cut from original, if it wasn't something much worse.

Iron aims to be 100% compatible with Chrome and all its addins. You can use any Chrome addin.

It's also open source, and is based on the open source Chromium (the open source version of Chrome, both of which are released by Google), you can download the source code and see the changes for yourself.

FF might not be as good as it was, but it still has by far the most plugins, and I actually do like new sans-menu-bar interface. That's the best thing about it, you don't like something in the interface? 15 min in .ini file or just download right plugin, and it's instantly tailored to you.

Tailoring that you shouldn't have needed to do just to have a decent interface, they should just have designed a good interface in the first place, and reserve such tailoring to the people who need more. Also, this falls back to an earlier point - the speed at which those changes and extensions get broken for no reason.

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I've also remembered another reason, multiple profile support. Firefox's multiple profile support requires playing around with the commandline, while in Iron/Chrome, it's built into the interface.

[Teddy]

It's an absolute memory hog. Leave it running any decent amount of time with any reasonable amount of tabs open and it starts to slow things right down. Heck, it happens even on one tab. Not just the browser window, the entire computer. This is by design, not a memory leak or other bug.

Say, when was the last time you observed this behaviour in Firefox? Because I used to have this problem, which was completely detrimental to performance on my 2GB laptop, but it disappeared a good half a year ago, and I haven't had a single problem with memory usage ever since, despite leaving it on for weeks and letting it amass up to 50 tabs at once in the meantime. Several of my classmates can attest to the memory performance having become better as well.

Now, CPU usage is a completely different matter, as a few days of continuous usage tends to make Firefox explode in CPU usage for me, eating up a full core on my dual-core computer. I think at least parts of the problem lies in the the Flash plug-in, as killing the Flash player has an at least partially alleviating effect, and the time before the explosion happens seem to be inversely proportional to the number of YouTube tabs I keep running at once. Still not as detrimental as hogging memory, and I can usually go about my regular routine, and even run demanding internet applications, without having to bother with it, as I don't have any computation intensive programs on this computer to start with..


Also, you got me curious, what would the reasons be to intentionally design a web browser to be a memory hog?

[lesser_minion]

Or just install Linux. There are a whole bunch of Linux programmers out there rewriting it so that it is tighter, smaller, and faster. And Linux has an incredibly large number of useful apps.

Are you honestly trying to make the argument that either of these things are unique features of Linux? Seriously, they aren't even things it does better than the other mainstream OSes (OK, unless you count OpenBSD as mainstream).

There are a few "Linux apps" that are competitive with Windows apps in some respect. Next to none of these are Linux-exclusive, and the ones that are aren't even close to being good enough to justify switching OS.

Slow? Most reviews place Opera amongst the fastest, or as the fastest.

It's a little more complicated than that -- Firefox has hardware acceleration while Opera doesn't (quite), but I'm pretty sure Opera wins when testing pretty much every other component.

For most people, there should be no consistent perceptible difference in performance between the two.

[Rawhide]

Say, when was the last time you observed this behaviour in Firefox?

This week.

Also, you got me curious, what would the reasons be to intentionally design a web browser to be a memory hog?

They don't design it to be a resource hog, they design it to do something which makes it a resource hog, then leave it that way through every version despite reports that it is causing issues with the reason that it is a feature, not a bug.

[Teddy]

They don't design it to be a resource hog, they design it to do something which makes it a resource hog, then leave it that way through every version despite reports that it is causing issues with the reason that it is a feature, not a bug.

Hmm, weird. Could it be that I have this feature turned off? What is the feature?

[shawnhcorey]

What version of Firefox are you using? I just got an update to v17.0 toady. I know they have make a concentrated effort to reduce memory usage and memory leaks. I don't find it taking more room than most other browsers.

[Don Julio Anejo]

Eh, I use Firefox 12 set to never update and it works out much better than all the new, annoying 14-16-whatever versions. I think memory leaks were pretty bad around 4.0, then got fixed for a while and started again in 14.0, but this is unscientific observation.

But for me it's still the best browser out there. Chrome is okay, but I'm not a fan of the interface, especially the lack of an actual menu bar where I like to load my bookmarks from, the really abridged options menu and the uneditable "most commonly used pages" when you open a new tab. Sorry, but if I'm presented with an option like that, I should be able to choose which sites are linked to (i.e. like a favourites page) rather than risk people finding out I read OotS and fanfiction.

IE and security: as a browser it's no more or less secure than most other popular browsers. However, it's the one with the highest proportion of both users, and users who have absolutely no idea what they're doing. Therefore, it's the most commonly one targeted by hackers in an attempt to steal personal data and whatnot.

[Rawhide]

Hmm, weird. Could it be that I have this feature turned off? What is the feature?

It's a whole range of features which cause the issue. But basically, and this is an oversimplification, Firefox caches in memory every single page you have had loaded on every single tab you have ever had open, even once you've closed the tabs (and closing the whole window is the only way to clear it).

It's not noticable if you open a single that never changes, it's most noticable if you open a few pages that have scripts constantly running and updating the page - like, say, to use an example of a page many people might use, Facebook.

1) It's a little more complicated than that -- Firefox has hardware acceleration while Opera doesn't (quite), but I'm pretty sure Opera wins when testing pretty much every other component.

2) For most people, there should be no consistent perceptible difference in performance between the two.

1) I know it's more complicated than a simple "this is faster". The point was simply that Opera was right up there and that there isn't that much difference between them anyway.

2) Exactly.

What version of Firefox are you using? I just got an update to v17.0 toady. I know they have make a concentrated effort to reduce memory usage and memory leaks. I don't find it taking more room than most other browsers.

Tried just about every version since 2.x. They have all given me the same problems.

Thunderbird, which I'm still using, also has this problem, at least on Win7 - do you know any way to stop it, or is there an alternate program you'd recommend that I could replace it with?

The only way I've found to fix the problem on Firefox is to download the full installer from the website for the latest version, and install that.

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I just discovered another reason to not recommend Firefox. They are not even working on a 64 bit version.

[factotum]

It's not noticable if you open a single that never changes, it's most noticable if you open a few pages that have scripts constantly running and updating the page - like, say, to use an example of a page many people might use, Facebook.

I've never seen this behaviour, and I have Firefox open all day at work with three tabs (two of them containing pages that auto-refresh every 90 seconds).

[Rawhide]

I've never seen this behaviour, and I have Firefox open all day at work with three tabs (two of them containing pages that auto-refresh every 90 seconds).

At a guess, it's doing a proper refresh and deleting the previous copy from the cache, rather than loading a new page or overloading on a script.

[Teddy]

It's a whole range of features which cause the issue. But basically, and this is an oversimplification, Firefox caches in memory every single page you have had loaded on every single tab you have ever had open, even once you've closed the tabs (and closing the whole window is the only way to clear it).

It's not noticable if you open a single that never changes, it's most noticable if you open a few pages that have scripts constantly running and updating the page - like, say, to use an example of a page many people might use, Facebook.

Facebook is up there among the 10 tabs I keep open at all time, and always open up the first thing I do at start up. I don't think it's as simple as that any longer...

[The Succubus]

I got my new computer yesterday!

I tried Opera but found it kept grinding to a halt for some reason. I'm using IE at the moment and it seems to be behaving itself without any problems. Also using Zone Alarm and Malware Bytes.

It is very, very shiny. Dota 2 has never looked so good. <3

[Rawhide]

Facebook is up there among the 10 tabs I keep open at all time, and always open up the first thing I do at start up. I don't think it's as simple as that any longer...

It's still happening, to me and to others. It doesn't happen to everyone, obviously, but it is still happening. Not only that, but I have tested it against other browsers with the same tabs, and they had no issues.

There's even a third party application to try to fix it, first released in May this year.

using Zone Alarm

Ye gads! They still make that? Hope it has improved immensely since I last used it.

[valadil]

I'm going to have Linux as a secondary OS on my new computer. I can't wait to see how Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, Dungeons of Dredmor and possily Dota 2 run through the brand new Steam client for Linux.

ANy penguinistas out there care to suggest a flavour? I've heard bad things about Ubuntu and I'm currently looking at Linux Mint.

You've heard the most complaints about Ubuntu because it's the most popular. It's a good starting point. If you don't like it you can figure out why you don't like it and then figure out how to switch. Most importantly for your use case, Ubuntu is what Steam on Linux is being built for. I'm sure it will eventually trickle back to other distros, but it will work on Ubuntu first.

One issue - drivers. Demanding 3D games need all the power they can get, they don't like to have only 50% of the power because of third rate attention given to platform they run on.

That has been the case for quite a while. But Valve porting Steam is a big enough deal that they've thrown their weight around and gotten Nvidia to fix quite a bit. I can't find the article, but I read that in 3 (I think) months of porting L4D, Valve got its FPS higher than the Windows version. Most of that was from driver fixes.

[Flickerdart]

It's still happening, to me and to others. It doesn't happen to everyone, obviously, but it is still happening. Not only that, but I have tested it against other browsers with the same tabs, and they had no issues.

There's even a third party application to try to fix it, first released in May this year.



Ye gads! They still make that? Hope it has improved immensely since I last used it.

I just installed that application and it's cut down memory use something like 90%. Thanks for the link!

[Teddy]

It's still happening, to me and to others. It doesn't happen to everyone, obviously, but it is still happening. Not only that, but I have tested it against other browsers with the same tabs, and they had no issues.

There's even a third party application to try to fix it, first released in May this year.

That doesn't look neccessary. In 3 clicks (Tools -> Options -> Network), I found an option to limit cache space while just looking around. It almost seems too blatant form me to actually think it works after all these complaints I've heard, so I suppose only continued tests will tell if FireFox nevertheless exceeds its boundaries, or actually respects them. So far, it hasn't been acting up...

[Avilan the Grey]

Not that it matters but it seems to be two major problems with Firefox at the moment:

1. The Flash Plugin crashes randomly, and has been doing so for the last... 2-3 versions of FF. FF blaims Adobe. Adobe shifts back and forth between claiming it doesn't happen, and that it is FF's fault. Nobody does anything about it. The best cure is to force an install of Flash 10.x and refuse any updates (if it bothers you. It doesn't bother me, it doesn't crash mid-video so all you have to do is hit "reload" and it works).

2. It hates certain machines, randomly. My wife uses FF and it is very slow on her machine (Sony Vaio, 2 years old). I have never had a problem on any of my laptops (all ASUS). My old laptop and her Sony are exactly the same specs.

Of course there are pages that are slow, most of the time it's pages full of ads and badly written scripts.

Btw I am these days using Waterfox instead of Firefox, for speed-optimized 64-bit support. I can definitely recommend it...

[The Glyphstone]

So, Firefox is unfriendly to Mac users. This is a problem why, exactly?