That sounds unpleasant!

But you'll admit that you're an edge case, right? Even most of the trolls here on /. complain about one or two things (awesomebar, status bar), but not fifteen different behaviors they hate.

So now the question is: How much energy should Mozilla devote towards specifically your needs? Your needs are no less valid than anyone else's, but the converse is true too: Everyone else's needs are no less valid than yours. So when faced with the choice between making Firefox more usable for 399 million people, or adding and maintaining fifteen UI options so you can make Firefox work the way you and your million closest friends want, what do you think we should do?

There is a real cost even to adding and maintaining a "disable X" button to the UI, and if we did that every time we changed something, as you seem to be asking, we'd quickly end up doing nothing but fix bugs in the exponentially-growing set of ways one can configure Firefox's UI.

Or maybe you think we simply shouldn't change anything, ever? That might satisfy you, but again, we agree that you're an edge case, right? Do you honestly think that would satisfy everyone?

The first quote is plenty to file with. We'll ask some questions, but we'd do that no matter what you filed with. :)

If you want to get more info, that's great. But don't let fear of filing an imperfect report keep you from filing anything at all!

We all appreciate this, I think. Thanks!

Since I've been paying attention, it's always been Mozilla's UI philosophy to do what we think is best for users and not to clutter the UI with an option for every feature someone might want to change. In other words, we've always decided for you, for better or for worse. It just might not have seemed that way, when you liked the decisions we made.

But we also make a browser which is flexible enough to let you install an extension which reverts you back to the old functionality. For those 1% of people who don't like it, there's an out. I guess I still don't understand why this is such a big deal to people. Go get the extension and be happy again.

Don't be afraid of filing a bad bug. A lot of these "snapiness" issues we've been debugging lately start out with really tough steps to reproduce: "Browse like I do for a few days." We have means of figuring out what's going on, even in those cases. But we can't do anything unless you take the first step and open a bug on bugzilla.

Not all extensions cause leaks. At this point, perhaps most do. We found leaks in four of the top five add-ons, although most of those are now fixed.

But I'd be kind of surprised if that Status-Bar-4-Evar add-on leaks. Leakiness is usually caused by touching page content, which that add-on (hopefully!) doesn't do. Try it and see!

I do agree in general that we can't tout extensions as Firefox's killer feature and allow them to destroy users' experience. http://jlebar.com/2011/11/13/The_carrot%2C_the_stick%2C_and_the_wrench%3A_Add-on_leaks_are_everyone's_problem..html

This is a common /. misconception, that "bug reports" like this are actionable.

There are so many things missing from this: The reporter's operating system, which version of Firefox is affected, whether Firefox is actually swapping or the disk is spinning doing something else... We'd want to see if the garbage collector is making Firefox slow. We'd want to see if a newer version of Firefox doesn't have this problem. Like another poster said, we'd want to have a look at about:memory before and after the problem occurs. Moreover, if the problem has to do with Yahoo Mail specifically, it may have to do with the reporter's specific YM configuration. Enough Firefox users use Yahoo Mail that if anyone who opened it experienced cringe-worthy performance, we might have heard about it.

The quote above is a fine initial post in a bug report. But we'd need to go back and forth for a bit to establish set of steps to reproduce that might lead a developer somewhere.

Firefox has 400 million users. (That's 1/20th the world's population, for those following along at home.) Any time we make a UI change, some of these 400 million people will love it, and some of those 400 million people won't. I'm sorry you didn't like this change.

There's an add-on to get the status bar back. Can we move on, please?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/status-4-evar/

If you love Firefox, please file a bug (bugzilla.mozilla.org) and cc me [:jlebar]. Bugs from the community are how most of these problems get identified and fixed -- we simply don't have the testing resources that Google, Apple, or Microsoft has. We rely on you guys as much as you rely on us.

If you file a bug (or if anyone else reading this thread files a bug), I promise I'll take a serious look and try to understand your problem.

I believe there's a parallel with a common fable:

You saw a wolf. I said I shot many, that the wolf situation should be improved, but you kept seeing wolves. This repeated many times and made you angry.

Now lots of others are saying that there really are fewer wolves these days. Indeed, you have no reason to believe that they're wrong.

But because of the offense done to you some time ago, you're going to continue crying wolf, even given no evidence at all?

I don't understand. I guess this is an attempt to punish us? Is it that you feel like we harmed you with our lies, so you should try to harm us with yours? I'm afraid that by crying wolf, and encouraging others to do the same, may just cause us to ignore you all, which is exactly the outcome you don't want.

I'm very sorry you feel like Mozilla deceived and harmed you. But the malicious attitude here and elsewhere in this thread is getting old. Use Chrome, if you like! But don't encourage people to waste developers' time with false claims.

We are so on this. In fact, add-ons are the majority of what we talk about at MemShrink these days.

In theory, leak checking is now part of the addons.mozilla.org review process, so new add-ons will all undergo a (very basic) leak check before they're approved. I'm sure we'll have to tweak as time goes on, but it's a start.

http://jlebar.com/2011/11/13/The_carrot%2C_the_stick%2C_and_the_wrench%3A_Add-on_leaks_are_everyone's_problem..html

I've written and reviewed many of the patches mentioned in the presentation. :)

You're right that we can't change malloc so that, instead of returning 1025 bytes, it returns 1024 bytes. What we do is change the code which calls malloc so that, instead of asking for 1025 bytes, it asks for 1024 bytes.

Of course you can't always do this. But if you read TFA, you'll see a number of examples where we can.

You are aware that not all of Firefox's address space is in memory, right? I'm pretty sure that Firefox does not use hundreds of MB of RAM just for storing URLs.

What's to stop us from changing a 1025-byte allocation to 1024 bytes, rather than 2048 bytes, as you assume? There's no reason we need round up, and indeed we usually don't.

But note that even when we do round up, it's still an improvement: The slop is rarely usable memory -- you can't use it without first calling malloc_usable_size to realize that you have any slop. But if we round 1025 up to 2048 bytes, now we have almost double the amount of memory to play with. We pay 2048 bytes either way, but when we round up, we get to use all the memory we allocated.

I'm sure you'd agree that the 11-year (so far!) support cycle for IE6 has been a boon to consumers and web developers; Mozilla is indeed short-sighted not to want to replicate that rousing success!

We accept patches.