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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."
America has a serious problem. America is addicted to tabs, which often lead to memory shortages. We need to wean ourselves from this addiction.
Which version of Opera do you experience this with? Having been a long-time Opera user, I cannot say that I have ever seen that sort of consumption from Opera, even with 20 or more tabs open at a time. The upper bound is typically 75 MB, starting off at 23 MB or so on start up. That is with a 50 MB cache, mind you. So it is understandable that the consumption reaches up to 75 MB, when 50 MB of that is cache.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Please don't take Java to be a good example of a garbage collected language. It unfortunately has given the technique a very bad name.
Look to languages such as Python, SML, Common Lisp, Smalltalk, Ruby and others for examples of garbage collection done right. Most of the popular implementations offer superb GC capabilities which offer better memory usage than that of the Java GC, all without the overhead of the Java collector.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.