Why Firefox frustrates me

[yendi]

11% CPU usage is bad enough, but that at least fluctuates and can go down. 2.5GB of virtual memory? Fuck no. And nearly 400MB of real memory? Motherfucking no.

I love a lot of what Firefox offers, but it leaks memory like nobody's business.

And yes, I don't doubt that Google Reader and GMail contribute, as do any sites that run Flash (I keep Java turned off, as no site needs to even think about running Java apps without my permission, thank you very much; otherwise, I think I'd be at 4GB of vm usage). But we live in a Web 2.0 world; if the browser can't keep up, that's a problem, no matter how fast it can render a page of html.

Comments

[yendi]

I restart it about once a day. The "Bookmark all tabs" at least makes this a little more tolerable.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Wow. I wonder what you're using that I'm not that is making that much difference?

I did turn off in-memory caching because my workstation here hasn't really got enough memory for my IDE. Maybe that's where the big leak is.

[cedear.livejournal.com]

Er, "Bookmark all tabs"? Do you not have Startup set to "Show my windows and tabs from last time" (http://www.firefoxtutor.com/70/session-restore-is-built-into-firefox-2/)? And that's without a session manager add-on.

I use Opera, which had tabs and session restore before anything else, and haven't lost a browsing session in years.

On the main subject, I'm surprised these (http://pavlovdotnet.wordpress.com/2007/11/10/memory-fragmentation/) haven't (http://pavlovdotnet.wordpress.com/2007/11/14/leaks-memory-we-never-forgot-about-you/) been posted yet.

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

Opera rocks the pants off of every other browser (and mail client, and news client, and RSS reader) out there, but I've found it's got a memory leak, too. I had thought it rather severe, but it seems it's slower and gentler than Firefox's one, so I'm going to stop being concerned about it.