Slashdot Mirror
Google's Shadow Over Firefox
eldavojohn writes "The Mozilla Foundation's chief executive now earns roughly half a million in pay and benefits. With $70 million in assets, the Foundation gave out less than $300,000 in grants to open source projects in 2006. And in 2006 85% of their $66 million in revenue came from Google. When these figures first came to light, people worried whether Firefox was becoming a pawn in Google's cold war with Microsoft. The Foundation addressed these fears and largely laid them to rest; but now the worry is that, even though it's clear that the community's code is what makes Firefox successful, Mozilla may be becoming dangerously reliant on Google's cash."
You're kidding, right?
Everyone I know using Firefox on the Mac has the same problem. Reproducible? Perhaps the foundation could just buy a Mac for testing.
In the six months since I switched, the system has been rock solid and every other application has been fine, only Firefox needs to be repeatedly restarted due to ballooning memory use.
Right now, after just two hours of light usage since Firefox last slowed my entire system to such a crawl that it had to be restart, one window and three tabs open (Gmail, Google reader, slashdot), Activity Monitor shows Firefox at 322MB real memory, 824MB virtual and growing. I don't actually know how high it goes before becoming completely unusable (haven't bothered looking) but it must be pretty high - I have 4GB of memory installed in this laptop and, usually, no other apps running.
That is with the most recent FF, 2.0.0.9 - there is, absolutely, a problem; perhaps if the foundation were not in such a rosy financial situation they would have an incentive to fix problems that affect a significantly large minority of their users.