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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.
Sometimes the sociology of Firefox bugs is more interesting than the bug itself.
The parent comment has been marked Troll and Flamebait. (Numerous other Slashdot comments discussing the same CPU and memory hogging bug have been marked +5.)
Why so much denial?
I'm talking about how Firefox still has leaks today (current version, right now). The damn thing has been out for years, and it's about as leaky as a screen door on a submarine. The OSS model is supposed to help make sure things like this don't happen, or if they do, they're less severe. It's been years, and Firefox still leaks memory and crashes like it's still in development (I've had two crashes in the past 3 hours, already). It's as bad or worse than many closed-source projects. In this particular case, OSS hasn't really proven itself to be more effective than closed source.
I don't respond to AC's.
I'm probably replying to a troll, but here goes. What you're saying is that you need the equivalent of a Ph.D. to program in C++ poorly. Exceptions and STL are disgusting and shouldn't even be part of the language, IMHO, and their overuse is a good way to spot a novice programmer. It is precisely the horrible nature of exceptions that is the reason it too so long for them to become usable.
There is nothing that an exception can do that can't be done better with either A. returning reasonable error codes up through the stack (where they might be handled in a useful or interesting way at some point in the future) or B. calling a die() routine if the failure truly is something that truly can never be handled. All exceptions do is make it harder to figure out how you got from point A in the app to point B by suddenly tearing down the entire stack in-between unceremoniously, and simultaneously discouraging the use of cleanup routines at every step along the way, thus encouraging bad code.
Every piece of code I've ever seen with exceptions has been a total mess, and all of them have eventually been rewritten to not use exceptions and suddenly worked a lot better. This isn't a case where more knowledge of how to write code with exceptions helps much, but rather a case where the programmers would have been better off had they never learned that aspect of C++ at all.
STL is just a pile of syntax that basically does what we used to do with void * pointers, just without the flexibility and programmer control (albeit with the possibility of a bit more type safety checking). I have yet to see a single situation where anyone used templates that could not have been done nearly as easily and much more readably without them. It isn't evil, per se, but it is completely unnecessary to understand it as long as you don't have to use it, and the only reason you ever have to use it is if you inherit a project where somebody else used it to begin with.
As for your comments about new and delete, using them correctly doesn't take a lot of in-depth knowledge. It's not that hard to remember that every time you create something, you must destroy it or you'll leak memory. If you can't figure those out, you should be sent back to school before being allowed to touch a single line of code.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
And incorrectly. Among foxit's many, numerous bugs is the inability to correctly number the pages, which makes it pretty fucking hard to discuss the document with someone who uses foxit, because eventually you will say "It's on page 8" and they will say "page 8 is blank!" and then you will find out that they use foxit and then you will just have to stop talking to them or possibly beat them to a bloody pulp for wasting so much of your time.
Not that I'm bitter. I'm just really tired of people saying "XYZ is faster than ABC" when the reason XYZ is faster is because it does half of everything incorrectly.
These issues have been reported for years and years now. The fact horrible memory leaks still exist simply underscore how crappy the Firefox coders really are. Putting that into perspective with the fact that Firefox is typically on par or better the IE, really has profound implications for the MS IE developers.
Wow. I think I just scared my self.