Mozilla May Have Plugged Firefox's Memory Leak Once and For All
Mozilla May Have Plugged Firefox's Memory Leak Once and For All
Posted 07/06/2011 at 8:36am
| by Paul Lilly
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Mozilla's Firefox browser rose to prominence by doing things Microsoft's Internet Explorer refused to do, like tabbed browsing, providing frequent updates (five years passed between the release of IE 6 and IE 7), playing nice with Web standards, and supporting extensions. But if Firefox has an Achilles heel, it's the browser's notorious memory leak problem that some users have reported with each and every release. Word on the Web is that Mozilla may have finally found a permanent solution.
According to The Inquirer, Mozilla identified an issue with the JavaScript engine in Firefox and has come up with a fix that, so far, appears promising. Testers are reporting that all is well with the new scheme, noting reduced memory utilization.
Part of the problem with Firefox's memory issue(s) is that the browser uses 1MB chunks to keep system objects alive, and that can lead to bloat over time. The solution, it appears, is to increase the frequency of garbage collection.
Pending further tests, The Inquirer says this could be incorporated into Firefox 7.
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ChatterboxChuck
July 06, 2011 at 12:53pm
Why make us wait? This is something that. not only do we need now but we need bad and it's something Firefox needs to implement if they don't want to lose everyone to Chrome. From here to Firefox 7 is a long way.
illusionslayer
July 06, 2011 at 2:23pm
Switch to the Aurora or Nightly channel if you want it sooner.
Nightly's been on 7 for awhile now and Chrome uses more than Firefox does anyway with it's 1 proccess per tab approach.
Dartht33bagger
July 06, 2011 at 11:19am
I've never once had a memory leak in the 4 years that I have been using Firefox, but I'm glad that it is getting fixed.
Danielt876
July 06, 2011 at 5:38pm
There has been a memory leak every single time you open Firefox. Even for you. It only really becomes noticable after it has been open for a while as it needs time to capture and hold hostage all your precious RAM. People with high end systems dont notice it though because they dont run out of RAM easily. I have a few older computers and cant use Firefox because the memory leak quickly eats up everything I have, but with my gaming computer I can leave Firefox open for days and still not notice anything but if I look in the task manager Firefox always has very large amounts of memory used and it goes up very steadily. Usually about 1,000 Ks every second after its reached 300,000 but I have 12 GB of RAM so its not an issue with this computer.
kixofmyg0t
July 06, 2011 at 8:49am
Couldn't this be fixed by an extention? Oh well, it's good news. I usually have 30~40 tabs open at a time. Group tabs(Tab candy) is a godsend.
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