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

[digriz.livejournal.com]

Just don't try to report it to the Firefox developers. Apparently, their standard response is either "That's never happened to us; you must have something setup wrong" or "Oh, that's because *insert bogus techie-sounding answer*, and it's not really a bug, it's supposed to do that". (I don't doubt that certain extensions, or certain combinations of extensions, make the problem worse, but I've had enough issues with a plain-jane install to convince me the browser is fundamentally broken somewhere.)

Oddly enough, despite their protests that nothing is wrong, Firefox 3 is supposed to have a "built-in memory usage monitor and manager"...

[yendi]

Alas, that seems to be par for the course in the open source community in general.

Oddly enough, despite their protests that nothing is wrong, Firefox 3 is supposed to have a "built-in memory usage monitor and manager"...

Also, they've always been at war with Eastasia.

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

a "built-in memory usage monitor and manager"

Known to programmers everywhere as "the built-in garbage-collection feature of most modern languages"?