Firefox Granparadiso + Patch and tweak

[Jim Kronebusch]

> Good news is I think a fix for Firefox is just around the corner.  Two of the major
> Firefox developers have now jumped on the threads as well and seem to have a 
> plan in place and say that implementing user modifiable setting for max pixmap 
> storage is trivial and that there should already be a way to disable.  Between 
> what they are looking at doing along with some version of Federico's patch for 
> setting a discard timer, things are looking good.  To follow along see these bugs:
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=395260
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=296818
> 
> I have also seen some pretty decent discussion from the xorg mailing list on 
> how this could be dealt with globally to not allow any application to crash 
> the Xserver.  However this still won't keep OpenOffice running.  So I think 
> next week I start bombarding OpenOffice mailing lists.
> 
> Anyhow I think things are finally looking up.

Apparently the Alpha of Firefox 3 now has a feature to disable image optimization built
in.  If you are running the Granparadiso build launching the browser with the following
command should do this:
env MOZ_DISABLE_IMAGE_OPTIMIZE=1 firefox.granparadiso

I did so on my test machine and hitting the test site Firefox remained stable and any
time pixmap allocation exceeded 25MB the cache was cleared and started over, without
setting the environment variable usage would hit 500MB+.  A setting to enable this in
about:config would be nice, but this is a start.

Jim

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