What's actually surprising is that it took them this many years to get it fixed. Memory fragmentation is just as bad as memory leaks. To the user, the RAM being used just keeps going up and up until they run out of memory and have to restart FF.
A colleague of mine said "eternal vigilance is the price of low memory usage". Firefox's memory behaviour has varied over the years. FF3.6 was fairly good. FF4 wasn't good. FF5 is a bit better. FF7 is looking like it will be much better. You can get Nightly builds of FF7 now (nightly.mozilla.org), and you'll be able to get Aurora builds of it in a couple of days.
I remember that blog post like it was yesterday. I guess the Mozilla source code is such a gargantuan beast at this point that it really does take years to get significant improvements into it?
Could explain their recent flurries of rewriting the javascript jits.
Yes, Mozilla source code is huge (5.2 million lines [1]). But keep in mind that all browsers are roughly that big (compare Chrome, at 4.8 million lines [2]).
this is the #1 reason why I sought out a Firefox alternative a long time ago. I like to have a lot of tabs open, and to almost never close or restart the browser. Firefox was, and to an extent still is, unusable with that type of usage pattern.
I hope they get it sorted out because it is the main blocker to getting a lot of the early adopter crowd who have switched to chrome back onto Firefox.
Try an FF7 Nightly build (nightly.mozilla.org) at this time tomorrow. Some great improvements have been made recently, including the one discussed in this thread. If you still see problems, please file bugs and CC me, I'm ":njn" on bugzilla.mozilla.org.
I will! I still have an old build here and I have been meaning to update it and checkout the latest, I haven't kept up with changelogs or dev for a while - but this thread will prompt me to do just that.
Maybe you have a different use case than I do; my Chrome instance usually uses about 30% more memory than Firefox despite having a quarter as many tabs open.
Win7. Between eight and ten tabs open, one open to Grooveshark. Everything gets refreshed every eight hours or so. Firefox usually has anywhere between five and a hundred tabs open. Both get rebooted about once every three days for updates. Chrome is at 400MB, FF is currently at 300.
my own experience was that chrome on windows is the best/fastest browser experience available atm, but I don't use it often. have you tried chrome canary or webkit/safari? you seem to have a weird problem - it might be down to a plugin or extension, so I would disable them all and re-enable one-by-one.
chrome://plugins/ - kill flash, enable html5 on youtube, and you will never miss it. been 18 months for me, and I very very rarely find that I need to open a flash-enabled browser
I'm thinking there has to be more overhead with chrome simply due to each tab being its own process. I have left chrome open for weeks before without it screwing things up too badly though, so it seems to be alright.
Incidentally, does anyone know how many source lines of code iOS is? How about the software distributed on the OS X install disk minus hardware drivers?
