Firefox memory management

Joined
10 May 2004
Posts
13,056
Location
Sunny Stafford
Okies, I have a desktop & laptop. On both machines, Firefox's RAM footprint increases as the session progresses. It's like the old Windows 98 memory leak. As the session gets older, you had less resources in Windows 98. Similarly with Firefox. It wasn't that noticeable in Firefox 2/3, but is more evident in 4/5/6. (why 4/5/6 got released so closely together is another question!)

Found some memory management add-ons, which doesn't seem to offer much more than a restart button. 'Bartab' looked promising though which was an add-on that actively frees up some of RAM, unfortunately not supported by Firefox 6. I'm currently playing around with about:config, editing line browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers. It defaults to -1 which means unlimited RAM caching per tab which is why the browser's footprint increases per web page. I've changed -1 to 4 so that the tabs only caches 4 pages each. Gonna see how that gets on. Have you guys tried anything like this or related ideas to share?
 
They are speeding up releases to match Chrome. Lots of smaller updates with different versions rather than 3.6.200.121.2.3, or whatever they used to get up to :p

We might get to version 8 by Christmas which is bringing another UI apparently.
 
Errr yeah, I don't think they fixed **** in FF7 tbh...

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