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

Somebody call Redmond

[dedazo]

Someone needs to remind the IE team that this is not - I repeat not - one of the Firefox features they have to copy.

And this better be easily disabled. As in a checkbox in a dialog, not having to hack about:config. I don't pay $$$ per month for broadband just to have the browser playfully load teh interwebs into my RAM so I can "perceive" more speed.

It's ridiculous that Firefox uses 700MB of memory with 4 tabs open (right now, btw). They need to fix this, not engage in creative PR.

No freeing memory == memory leak

[Guspaz]

The problem is when you close tabs, Firefox doesn't seem to free the memory leak. It seems to stay resident until you kill Firefox. Not cool.