I think I set a record today. My computer started acting sluggish, and I came to find out that Firefox was taking up 465M of memory. And on a machine with “only” 1G of RAM.
It’s a good thing that Firefox 2 has that session restore feature that saves your work when you need to end a task in a hurry.
I run most of my applications in a browser: email, calendaring, RSS, help desk, invoicing, and more. A year ago it would have been a big problem to have this single point of failure — if Firefox dies then it’s essentially equivalent to my OS dying. But with session restore and the (mostly) stateless nature of the web most of those fears disappear. It has my vote for killer feature of the year.
Now if only I could keep memory usage to something around 100M.
UPDATE: I just came across IE7pro (by way of Lifehacker), an add-on for Internet Explorer 7 that provides session restore and a number of other cool features currently only found in Firefox and Opera.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Aaron // Mar 23, 2007 at 8:33 am
Firefox is a memory hog. Most versions have substantial leaks that dramatically increase memory usage. It’s not uncommon for firefox to swap out with a large number of tabs open.
I did find something interesting tho:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009749.html
Appearantly there are a few caching options, one introduced 1.5.
I also ran into the old browser.cache.* changes in about:config.
If you haven’t seen them before, go here:
http://www.simplehelp.net/2006/07/11/how-to-lower-the-amount-of-memory-that-firefox-uses/
Might help to cut memory usage.
2 ade // Mar 23, 2007 at 9:04 am
Thanks for the tip! I have tweaked the about:config settings some, but my settings didn’t quite match what was in the tutorial. I’ll see how it goes….
3 Doug Karr // Mar 24, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Aaron beat me to the tip. Firefox manages memory based on your system memory… I actually think it’s an intelligent way to do it. I don’t think that’s hogging it, I think that’s a great way to manage it. With Firebug, Live HTTP Headers, and flexibility like the about: config (about:cache is cool, too), I really think Firefox has IE beat.
4 Segun 'Dash // Dec 11, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Its really annoying when firefox clogs up all the available memory, but I don’t have a choice since it has the best feature all others couldnt figure out. LIVE FEEDS.
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