I doubt that the patch helps in this particular case as all images are present in the DOM, so Firefox will merrily load all of the images, independent of whether they are visible or not. This has been a longstanding architectural problem.
Mea culpa, I didn't want to steal the thunder from the great guys at Opera. From my end user perspective I only remember Opera supporting the <video> tag in a version which was released almost a year after Firefox 3.5 [1].
I know I start sounding like a broken record for those who read my comments regularly in these kind of threads, but I always feel inclined to point out that Chrome's much-lauded architecture has clear limitations once you start to push it too hard. I'm certainly not a typical user as I exhibit heavy tab usage. And I've used Chrome for weeks at times as my primary browser so I've come to know its advantages and disadvantages. Web pages may be given their own processes but they are not completely isolated from the browser process (containing the UI) since they have to communicate in order for the user to have something to see and interact with. And there are bottle-necks in the browser process. With too many open, active tabs the interface starts to stall badly. And the memory usage goes through the roof which causes the OS to swap pages from other applications out of memory which really hampers performance of the entire system. Chrome is optimized for the common case (very few tabs) but it doesn't scale well (i.e. at all) beyond this.
Whatever Mozilla will do to lessen the impact of content on the interface, I hope that they won't go down the same disastrous path as Chrome and make the browser unusable for any use other than the browser is optimized for. Right now I can have ~100 tabs open with Firefox thanks to excellent memory usage (including suspending tabs) and an interfaces which scales well (Panorama, switch to tab, tab overflow, etc.)
But I can see why Chrome is so attractive for many users. If you stay within its comfort zone the responsiveness is extremely pleasant in day-to-day usage.
Firebug is most likely the culprit [1]. Firefox 15 will have a general fix for the kind of memory leaks such as the one caused by Firebug (affectionately called "Hueyfix" after its inventor Kyle Huey by some) [2].
This is probably why so many features from Mozilla end up in other browsers:
-Notification bar in pretty much all browsers.
-Doorhanger panels
-Download pane which Safari managed to release first (unfortunately a common pattern)
-HTML5 video which Mozilla implemented first
-Do not track
-AwesomeBar which now all other browsers emulate with different degrees of success.
-Firebug which set the standard for web development tools.
And so on, and so on. The other browsers also contribute great innovations to the browser space and this is a great situation for the end user, but I don't really like how Mozilla is kept getting downplayed.
Unfortunately one misbehaving extension is enough to break Firefox' memory usage. I ran a fresh profile without any extensions for a few days recently and it was a marvel: Firefox kept releasing all memory immediately once I closed tabs.
Unfortunately Google's policy doesn't cause only malicious extensions to be removed from their web store. For instance, All Mangas Reader, a combined reader and management tool for online manga sites, was removed from the store for "copyright infringement", although it's the sites that are hosting the mangas doing the infringement and not the extension. Additionally, the copyright problem does not apply to all jurisdictions where the store is accessible. ChromedBird, a Twitter client extension, was also removed because Google didn't like that it contained the "chrome" string (at least this problem was easily alleviated by changing the name to SilverBird).
As long as it's still possible to install non-webstore extensions I'll learn to live with that restrictions as it's not an activity I perform often in the first place.
FWIW if you switch Firefox to small icon mode, hide the addon bar (previously status bar) and the bookmark bar, then Firefox only has a few vertical pixel less than Chrome for the content area. That's how I use my Firefox at least.
Depending on the site page loading can still badly affect interface responsiveness. There are a number of projects to alleviate this under the umbrella of the Snappy project[1] but for all the work the Mozilla devs have have put into it, Firefox as of now (Fx13) is still nowhere near as smooth as its biggest competitor for regular use cases. I'm hoping that the SuperSnappy research project[2] will produce usable results though.
"I think it's a bit more resource-hungry than Chrome"
Depends on what you measure and your usage patterns. Firefox runs circles around Chrome with regards to memory usage and features like "load tabs on demand" can further lower the general resource usage drastically.
The lack of native UI styling of 'select' elements is a disgrace though, especially on Mac. Firefox is the last browser to exhibit this and there are no sign that this will changed in the near future. :-(
No, it has nothing to do with loyalty but with utility and how you weigh the different feature sets of each browser (speed et al. being features as well for the sake of this discussion). I find such claims disingenuous because they assume that Chrome can act as a drop-in replacement for Firefox which can be trivially shown not to be true. You seem to compare the browsers from the point of shared features or features exclusive to Chrome which understandably can lead to wrong conclusions about Firefox users.
Chrome's features don't constitute a superset of Firefox features and vice versa. Examples for features exclusive to Firefox:
1) Tab groups
2) Awesomebar (which works very differently than the Omnibar)
3) History sync
4) Load tabs on demand
5) Bookmark tags
6) Livemarks
7) Better resource usage (especially memory)
And I could easily add several more, both native as well as the ones added by extensions. You may not care about some or all of these features because they don't fit into your browser usage pattern, but others do. Speed is also important to me and I'm glad that Firefox gets improved with each new version currently but it's not the deciding criteria as long as it doesn't inhibit me from using the browser as I wish.
Once SPDYv3 is enabled in a release channel the Chrome installations which only support an outdated SPDY version will rise suddenly if the current update trend is not reversed in a future version.
SPDY is in a better position to dictate the development of HTTP 2.0 as there are already two independent implementation in the wild, unlike S+M which so far only exists as a concept paper AFAIK.
The problem with Chrome not having such an option is not just limited to startup time when restoring a session. Having too many open tabs causes the resource consumption to go through the roof (especially RAM and CPU cycles). I can easily have several hundreds of tabs in Firefox (in combination with tab groups) because I usually use different small subsets of tabs during my sessions so the resource usage is quite manageable.
I've said it times and again: Chrome is optimized for a single use case (i.e. few tab users) at which it excels but tends to break down quickly once you leave its comfort zone, unless you have a fairly powerful system. Maybe the project leader nudge, nudge could divert some resources to make Chrome scale better. ;-)
Apparently not. There's an ever growing tail of users who get stuck with an outdated version [1]. It's not as bad as Firefox yet but surprising nonetheless given how much effort Google put into Chrome's update system.
Earth will easily survive humanity, even if we carpet bomb the surface with nuclear weapons. Even life is very likely to survive in its own niches as it has done during past global catastrophes. So worrying about earth is unwarranted in my opinion. Humans should be mostly concerned about their own species surviving in the foreseeable future. And so far I do not see any imminent danger of that happening, especially with our masterfully understanding to adapt our environments to suit our needs. But developments like global warming could lead to some drastic population swings in the future (e.g. via wars, famine, etc.).
Oh, and live will be gone on earth anyway, AFAIK in about 1 billion years when the sun has become so luminous that the oceans on earth will vaporize and ultimately escape into space. And the collision between the galaxies will very likely have no immediate effect on our solar system due to the vast space between stars (and therefore planets).
I'll just add another data point. After the release of VLC 2.0 I was slightly dissatisfied with the new interface on OS X and used the opportunity to try out a couple of alternative players. In the end I stuck with MPlayerX because of short startup time and the minimalistic interface. But it was only a short love affair. The keyboard controls are pretty much non-existent, it can't open DVD menus, it only shows half the available duration of some of my music DVD rips (dual-layer?!?) and I have some occasional weird timing issues with regard to subtitles (image and subtitles suddenly not in sync). In the end I returned to VLC and all of my issues disappeared.
So kudos to the VLC team for producing such a great product (despite some questionable interface decisions). I'll take a player which "just works" over the pretty and shiny competitors every day.