The n-th “Firefox leaks memory” rant

I know you’ve heard it a million times: FireFox leaks memory. It does not “consume a lot of memory”, nor does it “just consume as much free memory as your system has, but relinquishes it to apps that need it”. No, it leaks. How many times have you felt, “geez, my system is craptacularly slow…” and checked out your Windows task manager (or the fantastic Sysinternals Process Explorer) and found Firefox gobbling up 100, 200, 300MB of memory? Yup, it’s insane. I’ve even switched on the browser.cache.memory.capacity configuration item, and I’m still sitting pretty at nearly 100MB of memory used (yes, I have lots of extensions loaded). This thing is just memory crazy.

What does this mean? Yeah, I can shut down FireFox every day, but that’s stupid. My parents shouldn’t have to do that, and they are more RAM constrained than I am. I find it gets even stupider when you are cruising Flickr or any AJAX-y pages, say, like Last.FM. Oh boy. It’s this kind of thing that makes people tell me, “I don’t trust open source software”, or “Well, how do you control quality if no one pays for it?” It’s more than memory folks, it’s image.

Frustrating.

(btw, browsing and opening tabs just to write this post, now I’m up to 135MB. Sheesh.)

Edit (January 29th, 2006): Wow, just basic browsing the nike.com site (lots of Flash), and searching for good dessert spots in Boston has yielded an amazing memory consumption of … wait for it … 450MB. Wow, that’s why things felt sluggish. Oh, my f*cking god.

Edit (February 5th, 2006): Editing a wiki all evening and my computer felt sluggish. Firefox was consuming… no really … wait for it … 998MB. Completely Out Of Hand. Mozilla, you are making Firefox really hard to love.