Basic theory to Firefox 52+ / PaleMoon 28+ memory leak issues

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Plokzig

Basic theory to Firefox 52+ / PaleMoon 28+ memory leak issues

Unread post by Plokzig »

So I've done a small amount of research into why Firefox versions above v50 have severe stability issues... it seems like the interface responsible for plugins/add-ons is to blame, if anything. I'd probably like to see a more technical, codebase related reason preferably from somebody like roytam1 or Feodor2 as to why as they seem knowledgeable about the browser engine, but it does seem to ultimately be rooted down to the godawful XUL extension engine - to the point where I can see why they nuked 'legacy' extensions from a technical standpoint.

Whenever v52 ESR was released, no future work would have been done on the XUL-based extensions anymore (the same for maintaining testing on any Windows XP/Vista based operating system and maintaining that dependencies would compile on those two OSes), and all work would have been moved to WebExtensions, in preparation for the Firefox 57/60 "Quantum" generation - presumably some short time after v45. I remember an ex-friend of mine who had severe stability troubles starting from version 48 onwards and was stuck on v47 until that version broke for most websites.

This, inconveniently, applies to every New Moon and Mypal build starting from v28 onwards. Goanna/UXP fell so far behind that Moonchild Productions and its contributors forked not from the more mature 45 ESR codebase, but the instable, inconsistent and messy 52 ESR code for v28. The v27 builds have much less issues due to them being built from parts of the v24, v38 and v45 codebases then further refined, however they do not receive any rendering engine updates anymore, so the Modern Web is slowly becoming less usable on those engines.

Either way, it seems like having any number of add-ons installed seems to cause memory leaks to happen much quicker. Even having something like uBlock Origin, which you'd expect to help the issues caused by heavy websites by blocking obnoxious ad scripting, actually is one of the worst offenders due to its heavy JS usage in the background (and let's face it, thanks to Node.JS using the V8 engine from Chromium, no one else can keep up who is still bothering, even now). Another contributor seems to be any 'responsive web apps' using heavy AJAX in combination with JS - stuff like Discord and Twitter, which constantly poll using multiple connection processes through the roof.

Guess Firefox really is a tool to sell Google Chrome under the guise of 'it's free and open source, but Google pays us to keep Google the default and make their trackers whitelisted (as do CloudFront/Amazon/CloudFlare/Facebook/Twitter), and we're actually shittier anyway and ran out of ideas starting with version 4.0 so just go use Chromium or something anyway!'

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i430VX
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Basic theory to Firefox 52+ / PaleMoon 28+ memory leak issues

Unread post by i430VX »

Frankly, I don't think I've EVER actually noticed a memory leak in Pale Moon 28. NM28 has been my main daily browser since it came out. There are a couple of sites that I have noticed seem to have a chance to make the browser crash if you use said sites for hours on end, but the RAM usage always hangs in the neighborhood of 512-1024MB for me. (Surely, It would be less if I didn't have 100 zillion pinned tabs all the time)
As for addons... Just looked at the page. I've got three, one is disabled. UBo is one of the enabled ones.

roytam1
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Basic theory to Firefox 52+ / PaleMoon 28+ memory leak issues

Unread post by roytam1 »

my NM27 does receiving new changes from my upstream.
and for NM28, I do notice there is leaking memory when idling in a government website that is auto-refreshing itself every some minutes.

Plokzig

Basic theory to Firefox 52+ / PaleMoon 28+ memory leak issues

Unread post by Plokzig »

I expect it's related to the AJAX/JavaScript engine in Pale Moon being slow/unstable in any case then - it seems like the main 'stump' we've both noticed is auto-refreshing sites causing memory leak issues. Unfortunately so many modern websites are making their switches to using AJAX - even this board has AJAX refreshing in a few small places, so technically you'd be seeing leakages from this forum...

Discord at the very least probably holds onto a single connection the entire time, rather than using the full bandwidth - try using it on a slow (EDGE/2G) connection on a mobile phone, it will just be stuck at 'Connecting...'.

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Theodor
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Basic theory to Firefox 52+ / PaleMoon 28+ memory leak issues

Unread post by Theodor »

From my perspective the leak is about the browser does not free all memory upon close the page, though my study of the memory system not enough to consider something to do, i studied how malloc and free works observed they do such a mess and i not able to figure. From other side those auto-refreshing sites can occupy whole free memory quickly especially winxps 2gb regular amount. I don't recall was there a feature for stopping any activity on the page?

By the way new firefox begun rewrite code with rust language, and rust has much better memory management. For today i stuck on making rust working under winxp.

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