Mozilla Outlines Plans For Firefox's Memory Leak Woes
Mozilla Outlines Plans For Firefox's Memory Leak Woes
Posted 06/13/2011 at 11:57am
| by Brad Chacos
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Mozilla's Firefox started out as the little browser that could and has since grown into a full-fledged market force in its own right. But behind Mozilla's pretty little Persona-sporting smile lies a terrible secret – a secret that's been there almost from the beginning. A secret that can sometimes cripple the otherwise spunky browser. You see, just like poor old confused Aunt Dorothy, Firefox has a memory leak. That's not news. What is news is the fact that Mozilla might finally be stepping up to the plate to fix the problem.
Firefox's memory leak has been one of the major knocks against the browser for years, but the release of Firefox 4 brought the issue to a head, ComputerWorld reports. Apparently, as bad as the leak was in past versions, it's even worse in the newest iteration of the browser, and the site quotes a Mozilla developer as calling a solution to the problem a "pretty pressing need."
To that end, Mozilla started the "MemShrink" program. The program entails weekly meetings to discuss Firefox's memory issues. Coming out of each meeting, Mozilla plans on doling out specific bug fixes problems to assigned personnel, giving one person or group the lead role as the troubleshooter for a particular issue.
That's all well and good, and we really hope it works, but don't expect the leaks to disappear overnight. This isn't the first time Mozilla engineers have targeted the problem (a really quick Google search shows memory leak complaints way back in 2006) and it's still with us – and getting worse. At this point, eliminating the bugs must be a massive undertaking.
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khaz19
June 16, 2011 at 6:55pm
We use web-based applications for work. I am constantly opening and closing tabs throughout the day. We have 2GB of RAM in our workstations running WinXP Pro SP3. By noon, Firefox is using over 300MB of memory, and it becomes sluggish. If I leave it run all day, it will eat up to 700MB of memory and will take 4-5 seconds before a link that is clicked is actually activated.
Disabling all of my add-ons redueces the problem, but not by much.
phroderick
June 15, 2011 at 12:17pm
Maybe it's just my imagination, but it seems like Chrome has a more serious memory leak issue than Firefox. I usually have a bunch of tabs open (>20) in Chrome on WinXP and have to restart it every day or so to get rid of various sorts of anomalous behavior. Anyone else seeing this?
JohnP
June 14, 2011 at 3:35pm
Uhh, I have a half a dozen tabs open and my memory usage for 8Gb is 23% with Firefox using up a whopping 206MB (10%). I closed out the Firefox browser and now 22%. Where exactly is the issue here? The only thing that DOES affect me is page loading as the AD BLOCK addon takes a while to strip out the 20-30 ads on a web page (sorry MPC). My attitude is that if I cannot tell there is a problem then THERE IS NO PROBLEM. Straightforward enough. I will continue to enjoy Firefox, thank you.
d3v
June 13, 2011 at 9:33pm
Its not that big a deal anymore because memory is cheap and plentiful even on a web surfing machine.
In the past MS has been accused of making bloated software so that its OEM partners can sell faster machines. I wonder whether some of the contributors to Firefox have similar ulterior motives. Maybe some large OEMs have their developers working on FF?
SirBC
June 13, 2011 at 6:39pm
Too little too late. After 7(?) years of using Mozilla/Firefox, the daily memory issues became too much and I switched to Chrome 2 months ago. There are a few things I really miss but I haven't come across one memory issue yet with Chrome.
JoBlo
June 13, 2011 at 3:39pm
Not that Firefox' memory leak problem is that bad, but I power use the crap out of it for all my web based web application stuff I do and Firefox blows up every few days because of the accumulation cholesterol that gradually turns into slide show like operations then crashes.
I really do wish I had the time to get involved int he project more, and help with their problem. I have been using and following Firefox since their first beta years ago, and hoped it would be a true internet exploder alternative. Firefox from my point of view has replaced IE and I am forced to use IE less and less as time goes by. All the features in the world are utterly worthless unless you have the foundation to run them on. Fixing the current memory leak problem will hands down make Firefox way more desired over any other browser out today.
Keep up the pressure guys!
JoBlo
June 13, 2011 at 3:43pm
You bring up a good point, but the horrible state of the Flash player at the moment is only a current problem around Firefox. They have had memory leak problems since almost the beginning. It is more or less a lack of house keeping practices over the years that have lead to larger problems. Hindsight is always nice, but we all wish we had it for right now problems.
level1paladin
June 13, 2011 at 12:08pm
Not holding my breath for this one. They've made claims in the past about the mem leaks getting fixes.
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