IE uses classes and DLL’s that are built into windows itself. Firefox is self contained.

Here’s a screenshot from my newly formatted laptop. I just installed Windows and Avast. I’ve opened this site and only this site with Firefox 3 and IE 8. I haven’t installed any Firefox extensions yet. Look at the significant difference in memory usage. How much more if I had extensions installed? This is true guys, Firefox reached 800MB usage on my desktop one time with probably 12 tabs open.

http://i.imagehost.org/0150/ff_mem_hog.jpg

On my vista32 bit with firefox 3.5.3 and only firebug installed, within 2 hours I just had to shut it down using 310 MB of ram with only 4 tabs open. The sites open were only gmail, and three local sites I’m building.

If they don’t get this figured out their finished. Way worse than IE right now.

Opera smokes it on Linux. Like other people mentioned, they didn’t suck, but they sure do now. Websites don’t make memory leaks, shitty browsers that can’t handle them do.

it’s possible that the AJAX-heavy sites are leaking memory. Yes, even a website can start to allocate memory indirectly and due to shoddy programming prevent Firefox from ever releasing it. This becomes quite pronounced if the website is never closed and the browser (any browser actually) runs for a prolonged time.

It would be interesting to know about which sites you are talking about.

I am however still interested in other comments about the Orca browser which I mentioned in an earlier comment.

After a run of maybe three weeks she came to me and said that the computer is acting in a funny way. The virtual memory was full, there was simply nothing left (the memory usage was almost 3 GB). And guess who the guilty one was?

Shutting down firefox took ages. I told my wife to restart FF every two or three days.

As for myself I am using FF 12 hours a day for web app development/debugging but I have learned to restart it at least once or twice a day as it gets really, really slow after hitting the 600 MB barrier. And, yes, it still does not release any memory. I am running all major browsers (IE8, FF3.5, Safari, Opera and Chrome) side by side every day testing the same sites and FF is the only one that is constantly causing trouble even though I have used a considerable amount of time trying to fine-tune it.

Those of the commentators (especialy Squall L) who are constantly insulting other users obviously never use FF more than a few hours at a time or never use web applications that make heavy use of JavaScript. It is the only explanation. Please, try running it for a week or so and please run lots of ajax applications.

1. I bought the extra RAM to use in other apps (video and audio editing), not for a browser with half a dozen pages open in the background.

2. It (FF) doesn’t give the memory back, even when you exit the app. Other apps fail with insufficient memory, which wouldn’t otherwise fail if FF had never been run from a fresh boot.

3. Yeah, Vista 64 probably doesn’t like FF, or vice-versa.

4. Just because you don’t have the problem, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist for others, nor does it mean that their systems must be crap (read carefully how many people have had the issue manifest itself with clean installs, or on fresh VMs, with minimal, or no plugins). Yes, maybe it’s the pages/sites that they load – which are no less valid content than whatever it is others like to browse.

That said, I’ve decided to just uninstall FF (personally I’d like to uninstall Vista too, but I’m not yet quite ready for the leap to *nix yet – although I am tempted each day, nor am I giving M$ more $s for W7 so that I don’t have to deal with so many 64 bit related issues). Maybe sometime in the future FF under WV64 will have less memory issues, then maybe I’ll revisit it.

FF = 3.5.3

I’ll assume parts of this memory increase are to improve my browsing performance by caching objects in memory so that repeated use or visitation of a certain page doesn’t require reloading from site servers. Further, I would imagine FF controls how much caching it does via its interaction with the OS and depends on each person’s memory capacity. This would explain, as I’m sure noted by other commenters, the different usages observed across different systems.

If this is the case, it would be perhaps a useful feature, if not currently available (I’ve only dabbled with the slew of configuration variables in about:config), to control the memory management more explicitly. For instance, perhaps there could be a setting that tells FF to release memory associated with certain sites if you either don’t visit them for some time, or leave it all together.

Finally, I don’t know if this is what some have done here, but it is superior to quote Mem Usage as a percent of total memory since someone with 8GB of RAM isn’t likely to care about 300MB of usage. So with 2.5GB RAM, I’m looking at ~8% usage.

Actually.. Just learn.
There are multiple people within this blog commentary that have solved their memory issues, WHICH WERE CAUSED BY ROGUE AND POORLY MADE PLUGINS, among other things.

Though as with the laws of selection, some of you just fail with little to no excuse, its just a predominate trait that’s all.