Firefox Working to Fix Memory Leaks

Christopher Blanc writes "Many Mozilla community members, including both volunteers and Mozilla Corporation employees, have been helping to reduce Firefox's memory usage and fix memory leak bugs lately. Hopefully, the result of this effort will be that Firefox 3 uses less memory than Firefox 2 did, especially after it has been used for several hours." Here's hoping. Frequent restarts of things on my computer make me furious. I can't imagine why anyone would tolerate such things.

Comments

Re:Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

> Custom malloc/free implementation. (Yes, custom - not from libc.)

The "libc" malloc implementation for a certain platform is junk.

> C++ new/delete operators, which for all I know may be overridden to use their malloc/free.

Oh noes. It's especially fun that you don't even bother investigating the matter before attributing blame.

> One of the first two with reference counting to decide when to free/delete.

Which does waste a trivial amount of memory compared to garbage collection, but this is the least of the problems. The bookkeeping expense of reference counting is less than the problem of retaining references to objects erroneously.

You're retarded. The major problems with Firefox are:

1. It's over-architected with needless abstraction. This is also why everything that uses Mozilla as a basis is a memory hog.
2. By default it's willing to cache a lot, long after tabs are closed and forgotten about.
3. It can be difficult for the system to return pages because of fragmentation that results from not using a compacting garbage collector.