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

[crwilley.livejournal.com]

That's one of my pet peeves lately. At work (admittedly on an old version - Mozilla 1.7.2 - but the alternative is IE5, which won't even run LJ properly these days...), there's one particular message board where I can watch the memory usage climb, and climb, and climb, and climb; if I'm really actively reading, Firefox will crash after about 3 hours because it's eaten up all the virtual memory.

I'd blamed it on the site - which I'm sure contributes - but yeah, the browser needs to be able to keep up with the user's demands.

[yendi]

I'm actually almost glad to hear that the 1.x cycle still has issues; I prefer 2, but I'd downgrade if it made things better.

Still, they need to get their act together stat.

[crwilley.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this is a "still" - this version's from 2004. My computer hasn't been updated in that long, and the IT department won't do it because I'm supposed to be getting a thin client terminal "really soon"....which translates from City of Detroit-ese as "sometime before I retire". :|

[yendi]

Ah, yes. That's exactly the same timeframe in which I'm supposed to get a newer laptop at work. :-)