Re: 'But firefox is no longer just a browser' (Firefox fat on Javascript?)

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 10:48, Clemens Eisserer <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> ... and it fits into just as much memory as Firefox on a good day when
>> I'm NOT using it as a next generation runtime (but rather as just a plain
>> old web browser pretty much of yore).
>
> A Hummer will not consume less than a small green car, just because
> you drive it slow.

The beauty of software is that it is not constrained like hardware.

Firefox should scale itself accordingly.

> Yes, FireFox uses quite a lot of memory, so do the other major browsers.

"Everybody's doin' it" is not that great an excuse; it could well be
that everybody is driving a gas-guzzling SUV because that's the only
kind of car that is possible to make, but I doubt that very much.

> On machines with less memory, it caches more carefully.
> A lot is used for caching content like images and scripts, another
> part for places and all the session data your browser keeps around.

Maybe this needs to be rethought.

Are such resources being cached in working memory? Maybe most
resources should be cached explicitly on disk so that my kernel
doesn't inadvertently swap out my other running programs to make space
for a bunch of LOLcat images that MIGHT be opened again.