Firefox 3 Hogs Memory Like Crazy

When Mozilla released Firefox 3 as a public release candidate, it was supposed to fix a bunch of memory leaks and use less memory. In fact, it reads:

Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.

Technical, yes. Real? Not really. While I have heard from others saying that Firefox 3 is running lean and mean for them, I have heard from many others saying it is just as bad in the memory department as Firefox 2.

Check out this screenshot from my own Mac Pro running Firefox 3:

Yes, that’s 550 MB of RAM in use.

Now, I’m fully aware that the plug-in functionality of Firefox can lead to this issue. It is non-Mozilla code which is in use in the browser. But, I used pretty much the same selection of plug-ins with Firefox 2 as I am now with Firefox 3 and this is about 150 MB more memory than I had ever seen Firefox use previously.

Plus, if you have to steer clear of plug-ins to keep Firefox running correctly, then that is a stupid tradeoff. One of the primary “selling points” of Firefox is the ability to use plug-ins.

I have tried the RamBack plug-in. It shaved maybe 12 MB off the memory usage, but who cares. For all essential purposes, it doesn’t work.

I’ll continue to use Firefox, but thank God I have a bunch of memory in this system. Looks like I’m going to need it.

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AGH
Firefox 3.6.3
1)
Time open: 36 hours
Memory usage: 2.4 GB
CPU: 38%
2)
Time open: 3 hours
Memory usage: 418 MB
CPU: 10%
Switching tab, moving mouse, typing etc all slowed down to an unusable level (5 secs or more for anything to take effect). Goddamn.
http://twitter.com/palfrei Peter Palfrei
I've always had issues with firefox memory management. It could be that memory leakage depends on the system's hardware architecture. I'm running an AMD microprocessor and Firefox is quite slow. I've had the best speed results with Opera and Chrome but Google's browser lags a bit more yet not as much as Firefox.