Firefox Memory Leak is a Feature

SenseOfHumor writes "The Firefox memory leak is not a bug. It's a feature! The 'feature' is how the pages are cached in a tabbed environment." From the article: "To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited less than 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last five session history entries for each tab. This is a lot of data. If you have a lot of tabs, Firefox's memory usage can climb dramatically. It's a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web."

Comments

Re:spyware with IE or memory leak with FF..

[ashot]

there are many many other reasons to switch to Opera as well.

Re:What I'd like Mozilla devs to do

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just Mozilla getting back to doing what Mozilla does best, making crappy software. For years with every Mozilla browser release we were promised a fix to all the bugs and each time they either failed to deliver or they fixed some existing bugs but created new ones. This is why they started fresh with Firefox instead of wasting time trying to fix the bazillion bugs they had in Mozilla. For a while it seemed like they were actually on the right path with Firefox, but now it seems like they've reverted back to the Mozilla of old.

It's not all bad though, there's always Opera and IE7.

bfd?

[GeorgeMcBay]

Virtual memory, look into it!

Who cares if Firefox or any app is a bit of a memory hog???

As long as it is just using the memory as cache space and not accessing the memory randomly, it'll be paged out into virtual memory as needed.

I suspect a lot of the people who are bitching about this are the type that stare at 'top' output or the Task Manager all day looking for programs that are using a lot of memory so they will have something to bitch about when in practice having the program use that much memory just doesn't have much impact on system usability, assuming you're using an OS with decent vmem support.

At least its better then other features

[mikek3332002]

At least this 'feature' is better then the remote admin facilities in IE.

Re:Total cached page limit.

[CyricZ]

While powerusers find setting options in that way to be ideal (I'm quite fond of it), it just isn't something you can tell a typical user to do. Many have a difficult time with normal, GUI-based software configuration. The about:config feature is basically forcing them into editing a textfile, and that just doesn't fly.

We hear so often about how Firefox is meant for the masses, because it is supposedly a suitable replacement for Internet Explorer. That won't hold true until it offers a friendlier interface for such obscure configuration.