...it seems ... as if Mozilla went from being totally dismissive of memory complaints to being hyper-responsive to memory complaints with no (publicly stated) rationale behind the change.
I don't know what their internal rationale is.
"Memory is cheap," we like to say, but it's really only true if you're not wasting it like crazy all the time. Ten years ago you could surf the web with 512MB of RAM; now we're getting to the point where 4GB isn't considered enough. If 4GB now costs the same as 512MB then, then in the sense of "dollars worth of memory required to perform function X acceptably," memory hasn't actually gotten any cheaper.
If you can get performance that used to require 4GB down into 1GB, you've upgraded the performance of a bunch of older and low-budget devices from "barely usable" to "fine."
Take the big-picture view: updates like this can actually result in a slower flow of "obsolete" computers and devices into the landfills. This is one of those bottlenecks where a little good engineering can have really disproportionate positive aggregate effects.
This sort of thinking has been one of the selling points of desktop Linux for a long time. I wish Microsoft thought more like this.
Right. Also, no matter how cheap memory is, you run into limits of things like maximum RAM capacity. I'm there now... I have 8GB of RAM in this laptop, and that's all it can hold. I can't spend more money to put more RAM in here even if I want too, as it just won't take it. I'd love to go up to 16GB, but that won't happen until I buy a whole new machine.
Needless to say, I'm very happy about this firefox news. AS somebody who routinely runs a lot of apps (and more than a few memory hungry ones) I want every app to be a freaking memory frugal as it possibly can, and be a good citizen when RAM has to be shared between apps.
Playing the whole "Unused RAM is wasted, take up as much RAM as you can" mindset is fine if you only run one app at a time, but, really, who the f%!# actually does that???
I don't know what their internal rationale is.
"Memory is cheap," we like to say, but it's really only true if you're not wasting it like crazy all the time. Ten years ago you could surf the web with 512MB of RAM; now we're getting to the point where 4GB isn't considered enough. If 4GB now costs the same as 512MB then, then in the sense of "dollars worth of memory required to perform function X acceptably," memory hasn't actually gotten any cheaper.
If you can get performance that used to require 4GB down into 1GB, you've upgraded the performance of a bunch of older and low-budget devices from "barely usable" to "fine."
Take the big-picture view: updates like this can actually result in a slower flow of "obsolete" computers and devices into the landfills. This is one of those bottlenecks where a little good engineering can have really disproportionate positive aggregate effects.
This sort of thinking has been one of the selling points of desktop Linux for a long time. I wish Microsoft thought more like this.