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.
2 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.
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