If that's that case I much rather my browser eat up more RAM than needlessly write to my SSD.
A lot of the improvement in the reliability of consumer grade SSDs is due to OS improvements in how they manage their write operations to the hard drive.
Windows is considerably more conservative in how it uses it's page file and what does it write off to the SSD, linux has also made a lot of improvements in how it uses the swap partition if it uses it at all, other things like having to be able to suspend the PC in "hibernation" mode without actually having to write a "hibernation" file to disk by keeping the CPU at pretty much an off state but refreshing the ram also saves a lot of day to day write operations especially on mobile devices.
So overall I highly doubt that Firefox went with the suspend to disk route, because if it did it would be a pretty big step backwards.
Also as power conservation goes writing to SSD/HDD is more expensive than writing to RAM and keeping it refreshed, so using the SSD as a storage device instead of the RAM can also have negative effects on the battery life of mobile devices.
While I agree that I would rather my browser use more RAM than constantly suspend pages, I disagree with your notion that
>A lot of the improvement in the reliability of consumer grade SSDs is due to OS improvements in how they manage their write operations to the hard drive.
We're talking on the scale of writing 500gb to your SSD every single day for 10 years in order to reach their endurance limit (on average). Writing a few more gb at worst from your browser is hardly going to affect that. It's even doubtful that OS improvements change it much, as Windows 7, which a lot of people are still on, doesn't come SSD optimized.
Meh. SSD write amounts matter if you're running a datacenter. They don't matter to a normal user on a laptop/desktop using a browser. SSD lifetime simply isn't an issue, as the other commenter pointed out.
Also, from a more philosophical standpoint - this isn't Mozilla's issue. They shouldn't have to worry about conserving SSD writes. That's not their problem. That's the OS / Disk firmware / manufacturer's problem. If I want to write files to the disk at a very reasonable rate, I should feel free to do that.
> A lot of the improvement in the reliability of consumer grade SSDs is due to OS improvements in how they manage their write operations
Do you have any references for this? I don't think I've ever heard a story of a consumer user running out their writes. Not saying it hasn't happened, but it's not enough of a common occurrence to be a major factor in reliability.
In my experience the overwhelming improvement in reliability is in the firmware of these drivers coming out of the perpetual beta phase (and the death of OCZ)
A lot of the improvement in the reliability of consumer grade SSDs is due to OS improvements in how they manage their write operations to the hard drive. Windows is considerably more conservative in how it uses it's page file and what does it write off to the SSD, linux has also made a lot of improvements in how it uses the swap partition if it uses it at all, other things like having to be able to suspend the PC in "hibernation" mode without actually having to write a "hibernation" file to disk by keeping the CPU at pretty much an off state but refreshing the ram also saves a lot of day to day write operations especially on mobile devices.
So overall I highly doubt that Firefox went with the suspend to disk route, because if it did it would be a pretty big step backwards.
Also as power conservation goes writing to SSD/HDD is more expensive than writing to RAM and keeping it refreshed, so using the SSD as a storage device instead of the RAM can also have negative effects on the battery life of mobile devices.