685120 - improve the about:memory view

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 400120

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Eugen Paraschiv]

The about:memory view is a list of mostly incomprehensible details, mixed together with little to no logical grouping. This view should benefit from an overhaul that will address these problems: this view should perhaps show: 
- memory consumed by each plugin
- memory per tab
(see Chrome about:memory for an example of how to present memory consumption to the average technical user, not to a developer familiar to the inner workings of Firefox)

Comment 1

[Mardeg]

about:memory seems to be there to help users give meaningful reports to developers to track down leaks/usage in the MemShrink project rather than just as a presentation - http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/category/memshrink/page/2/
Following the progress there shows it has worked well in that role. An indicator of how that is reflected in Firefox versions, week 3 of the project talks about what went into Firefox 7, and since then it has moved to http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/09/07/memshrink-progress-week-12/ and the view in about:memory has evolved a long way since the Firefox 6 branch this bug is aimed at.
This bug needs to focus on those latest builds available at
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/ to be valid.

Comment 2

[Eugen Paraschiv]

I understand the original starting point of this page and the fact that it did not originally target the end-user. That being said, it does not change the fact that this something exposed to the end user, so care should be taken to present the information in an user friendly manner. Also, it is something useful in itself, not just for the MemShrink project, that is if the info is cleaned up and reorganized a bit - see the about:memory page in Chrome to see what I mean - the memory consumption is organized logically by plugin and tab. I will check out the latest-trunk and update the bug accordingly.

Comment 3

[:aceman]

Confirming as enhancement request.

Comment 4

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

about:memory is for Firefox developers first and foremost.  If you are a Firefox developer, the details are comprehensible and the grouping is logical.

Comment 5

[Justin Lebar (not reading bugmail)]

FYI, the per-tab organization of Chrome's about:memory reflects deep architectural features of Chrome (particularly, process-per-tab) which Firefox doesn't currently have.

Comment 6

[Eugen Paraschiv]

I am aware of the architectural differences between the two, but the Chrome example was just an example of attention to detail rather than a suggestion that the Firefox about:memory page should reflect the Chrome one pixel by pixel, or even at all. 
The memory page being targeted to firefox developers is something I would have to disagree with - the feature was released to the public and it doesn't inform the user in any way that it's only meant to be used by developers (about:dev-memory or a simple message on the page, or a feature flag that disables it would also make sense). 
About the details, even without processes there should still be a way to break up memory consumption cleanly by tab and hide the rest of the developer-oriented details. 
Thanks for the help and the quick feedback. 
Eugen.