While Firefox enthusiasts swear that the web browser is the best invention since sliced bread or the scientific calculator, there's no question that Firefox can be a bit of a memory hog. When you load your first window, the browser zips along smoothly. But open a few more tabs, do a little navigating back and forth, and before you know it Firefox is eating up half of your system's RAM.Mozilla has long insisted that this isn't a "memory leak" bug, per se, but rather a way to ensure that Firefox opens pages at blazing fast speeds. That's because an awful lot of information is kept in cache.
But bug or no bug, as Mozilla tries to figure out how to cram Firefox onto mobile phones, 200MB+ memory requirements just aren't going to cut it. Mozilla developer Stuart Parmenter has posted an interesting analysis of Firefox memory use on his blog. And Mozilla board member Christopher Blizzard suggests that over the next few months, we'll see developers tackling the memory use issue a bit more aggressively.
Of course, it's possible that reducing memory use will also reduce performance, so we may eventually see a version of Firefox with a smaller memory footprint for mobile devices, with a fuller-fledged version for desktop use.
[via TechBlog]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-12-2007 @ 3:59PM
Marty said...
Being a web designer, I use firefox daily. Mostly because all my friends talk about it like it's the new soylent green, and I like to check what a page is going to 'really' look like in a browser. But for casual web browsing, I still like to use IE6. Sue me.
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11-12-2007 @ 4:18PM
BillyG said...
Speaking of cache, have you ever tried using the Portable Apps version of Firefox? Exactly! I never have a problem.
If you wanna talk about bad code, check out any of the Google owned websites; those things are horrible. No wonder they asked everybody to turn off Firebug when using GMail. You can watch the error counter reach for the sky when on a Google Maps page, just horrible!
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11-12-2007 @ 4:45PM
Gardiner Westbound said...
Firefox hangs on some pages. Don't know why. Wish they would fix it.
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11-12-2007 @ 5:25PM
BehzadK said...
I am very big fan of firefox but i also sometimes experience high memory usage and need to forcefully end the process through task manager. I hope Mozilla resolve this issue.
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11-12-2007 @ 10:38PM
Bryan Price said...
Yep, as I'm typing this on my computer I'm remoted in on, it was over 256MB, it just settled down to 150MB. The reason why I'm not using on the actual laptop sitting in front of me? It's only got 256MB of memory to start with. The machine I'm remoting to has 3GB. Big difference.
And I bet you Gardiner Westbound that every page that it hangs on has JavaScript. Mozilla wants to move on to the next generation, when they don't have their own implementation right. But it's only on SOME computers. Before my latest install, searching with Google was worthless. I had to wait for the javascript to time out before I could do anything AT ALL on my computer.
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11-13-2007 @ 8:12AM
las6 said...
200+? Make that 1200MB+
At least that's closer to my current "high score" in Firefox memory usage. And that's just with around five tabs open with some web dev work done at the same time. I guess FF really doesn't like it when I paste 1mb txt file into an input field.
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