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Firefox Memory Leak is a Feature

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the that's-what-they-all-say dept.

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."

8 of 602 comments (clear)

  1. Somebody call Redmond by dedazo · · Score: 1, Troll
    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.

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    Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
  2. Re:Quick Fix by JimXugle · · Score: -1, Troll

    isnt that what "reload" is supposed to do... load the page again? not just re-render it?

    --
    -jX

    Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
  3. Re:How nice. At least no one got shot. by bobbyhc · · Score: -1, Troll

    i can think of a few things worse than not telling users about a little memory leak right away. they were just following cheney's lead. besides, it's not like this "memory leak" will lead to an extended stay in an ICU.

  4. No freeing memory == memory leak by Guspaz · · Score: 1, Troll

    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.

  5. Re:Firefox developers don't "get it" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    why don't you check out the code from CVS and start submitting patches? pissing and moaning here accomplishes NOTHING.

  6. Re:Total cached page limit. by Lord+Ender · · Score: -1, Troll

    ram is cheap

    really cheap

    seriously

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    A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
  7. Re:Congrads by heinousjay · · Score: -1, Troll

    I didn't reply to anything. I guess if you want to be an arrogant cock, you'd better make sure your own shit doesn't stink.

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  8. Re:My pet peeve! by machine117 · · Score: -1, Troll

    Firefox 1.5 and Camino for OS X now support middle-clicking fine, but not the Mozilla . I use Camino, and the only gripes I have are: 1- That middle clicking a tab doesn't close it--but at least it's got the "x" on the tab instead of off to the side. 2- Middle-clicking a bookmark doesn't open it up in a new tab.

    IMO, putting the close tab "x" on the side of the tab bar is illogical. FF used to have an extension called Tab X that could switch this around, but it is no longer supported.