, 1 min read
Firefox 1.0.7: better memory management?
I love Firefox, but one thing that’s causing me grief is its memory leakage. On my gentoo box, Firefox 1.0.6 would quickly eat up to 55% of my available memory. I had to kill Firefox every two days to get my machine working. I’ve upgraded to 1.0.7 yesterday, and it runs smoothly using only 25% of my available memory (according to “top”). Given that my browser is arguably the most important software application running on my machine and given that I’m unlikely at any one time to run two browsers, I don’t care if firefox uses up to 25% of my memory, but please, no more. When I’m not browsing the web, I’ve got to do real work like research and teaching. Interestingly, the release notes don’t mention anything about improved memory usage. Also, my Mandrake box (running 10.1) doesn’t seem to have this problem, nor do my windows boxes, irrespective of the Firefox version number. Anyhow, I’m crossing my fingers, hoping that Firefox will be well behaved this time.