Re: Let's start a survey on our userbase
On 2025-09-24 at 08:38 Damien Stewart wrote:
Maybe it's because I limit my tabs. But on PPC I find Firefox doesn't
need too much ram. For example, I have a Xenial install with an older
Firefox, version 47 or something. Would have about 40 tabs or so. It
loads fast. It would usually use up 700MB. Now, while that is running, I
can chroot into Debian and load up Firefox 138. Funny to load the latest
Firefox on an older Ubuntu but it works. And yes, the older Fox is 32
bit running in 32 bit userspace, but the newer Fox is 64 bit running in
the same userspace. Kernel is 64 bit. I keep it down to ten tabs and
even then it would be more CPU intensive. I check memory and both would
only take up about 1.5GB ram. I have 8GB in my machine. It's not even
breaking the 32 bit barrier. The only time I broke the 32 bit barrier
was when I loaded a debug build of Firefox into GDB and watched it soak
up 6GB ram.
So Firefox 47 is faster and uses up less RAM (1.5 GB with 40 tabs open
as compared to the same 1.5 GB with Firefox 138, but only 10 open tabs).
But okay, we're comparing apples and pears, because the one is 32-bit,
the other 64.
Anyhow, that's my point exactly. It would only make sense to me to use
current software. As long as it even runs, I'm okay with it, but I would
have also hoped for more (or rather: continued) optimization regarding
PowerPC specifically. This used to be part of Firefox, but since support
was dropped (even f not announced officially), the last optimizations
for PPC were removed from the code as well (i.e. as a fact: it's gone).
You can look at the great work of Cameron Kaiser with
https://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/ TenFourFox (which was
discontinued 2020:
https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfox-and-what-ive.html).
I think in one of his blog posts he describes how every version of
Mozillas Firefox was dropping more and more stuff that was specific to
optimizations for PowerPC or Big Endian, or introducing
incompatibilities due to no longer considering PPC and BE in the first
place.
IMHO -- and this is only my personal perception, so I might be wrong --
up-to-date version of established software is not only getting slower
due to getting more and more bloated, but also due to getting less and
less PPC-specific optimizations and less and less tested on the platform.
Again, maybe I'm wrong.
Many thanks for your reply!
Mac User #330250
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