Over at Deep Jive Interests Tony asks why the Firefox people haven’t addressed the issue of memory hogging yet. I’ve been wondering this myself. There have been a number of optimization articles written to cut back on the problem, which really just proves that it exists. Tony also proposes that there’s an opportunity there for another browser to step in. He questions the ability to compete with the huge theme and extension collections already available for Firefox.
Firefox is open source. There’s no reason that a spin-off couldn’t be built to fix the memory leak problems and still support all the community extensions. Swiftfox is a good example of this.
Honestly, I don’t think this is the way to go though. Once you have branching off, things can get confusing, as there’s a delayed update trail that can lag behind for quite a while depending on how much branching has taken place. I love Firefox, but there’s definitely a problem with my memory getting gobbled up. I think it’s time that someone at least addressed the issue and worked on a resolution so that it can beat IE in every category.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Leroy Brown // Apr 27, 2007 at 9:36 am
I’m not a programmer, and the price of Firefox is so low that it’s hard to get mad at the developers…. But it is annoying to see Firefox sucking up 580 MB of RAM, which sticks even if I close all but one or two of the tabs.
I don’t like the spinoff idea either, FWIW. I’ll only use Firefox direct from Mozilla… for lots of reasons…. security included.
2 fergs // Apr 27, 2007 at 11:34 am
For sure man. I’m not gonna stop using firefox any time soon, but something should be done. I shouldn’t need a gig of ram just to browse the web.
3 iPad Ron // May 10, 2010 at 5:30 pm
It was an issue for me too. I’ve gone over to google chrome and cannot fault it.
4 Kansas City Marketing // Sep 27, 2010 at 3:22 pm
I’ve just decided to switch back to Chrome as well because the glitch never has been patched correctly with my laptop. Although, the new IE 9 sounds interesting.
5 glee // Sep 29, 2010 at 9:43 am
i still have to kill the firefox process every so often when it grabs too much ram.
6 The Mundane... // Dec 12, 2011 at 11:29 am
Why is Firefox’s ‘Memory Hogging’ Still an Issue? Well, after recently updating to the new version, they seem to be using even more memory for their “restore last session” addition. I don’t know about y’all, but I don’t want the last web page I visited to be stored in memory. So, to combat such things, I open a blank tab before exiting, just so it will quit saving info like that. Either way, Firefox still seems to be more reliable than Internet Explorer.
It is funny that I ran across this post, because earlier today I did a blog post about Internet Explorer 9 and how it sucks so bad. You can find it here: http://mundane-blog.blogspot.com/2011/12/internet-explorer-ie-9-sucks.html
Yeah, IE 9 blows and has a lot more issues than simple memory hogging, to say the least!
—The Mundane Blog
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