Comments on: Firefox 3 Memory Usage

By: Amit

Amit — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:06:33 +0000

Hi
I just like to thanks all the people who worked nights & days to bring us the best browser. I believe there are meny ppl like myself apriciating all the effort you have done.

Thanks you all
and keep up the great job

Amit
A FFF
FireFox Fan

By: David

David — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 08:30:52 +0000

I have written numerous Firefox plugin’s and I have to say that Firefox 3 is definitely a push in the right direction. All the effort that guys like you have put into making Firefox what it is today is truly excellent.

It’s come a long way since it’s first releases and I hope it continues to make ground in the browser industry because it is a truly great piece of software that still shows up browser on the market.

By: Renee

Renee — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 09:45:55 +0000

Congratulations – I had noticed the old firefox using progressively more memory (I don’t go near IE anymore), and I was hoping someone somewhere was working on it. I’m ecstatic that you guys have worked out a solution. I started using 3.1… at work last week and immediately noticed the difference. This is even better news for my ancient home laptop (7 years and still ticking along in linux!), since I maxed out my RAM at 750MB.

Kudos to team Firefox!

your fan,

Renee

By: EH

EH — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:38:55 +0000

My experience mirrors I.K.’s. With only AdBlock and Netvibes (~100 feeds) open I can easily blow FF3 up to half a gig in less than a day just by letting it sit there.

By: Ten Years « pavlov.net

Ten Years « pavlov.net — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:26:55 +0000

[...] at full speed until the end of 2007, when I took a few months to look at memory usage. I’ve written in pretty great detail about the work that went on in fixing the memory usage in Firefox that [...]

By: I.K.

I.K. — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 09:50:50 +0000

Compared with FF2, for me there really are *no* improvements concerning memory usage.
With FF3 it even is worse than ever before!
Sometimes I get ~500 MB within the first 20 minutes by just opening some AJAX heavy sites – and memory is still constantly growing (same without extensions and/or a new profile).

Additionally FF3 often crashes, especially if the amount of used memory reaches high values. If it -exceptionally- does not crash I need to restart manually because of memory exhaustion or because it is slowing down. Meanwhile I believe ‘crashing’ is a new built-in feature to automatically release the memory.

Don’t get me wrong, I know you and others did hard work on it, but for me it missed to have any positive effect. I’m very disappointed even angry, anyhow I still use FF because I need some of it’s special features. No real alternative. According to my.Opera forum topics their current version 9.52 now has the same problems, just like Firefox. Memory hogging, it really seems to be an overall modern browser feature (lucky who believes that).

I do not need to read reviews or browser-tests as I experience the browsers performance every day while I’m working. I need to open (and close) a minimum of 500+ tabs every day, many of the sites are javascript intensive. My conclusion: It’s still a fact, Firefox allocates much too much memory and releases a minor part of it only. Parts of the FF code urgently have to be revised – for real work the browser is almost unacceptable.
If the leaks cannot be found or fixed, a minimum requirement would be a feature of seperating processes per tab – so that allocated memory is released as soon as a tab is closed.

By: Why Firefox 3

Why Firefox 3 — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 04:02:36 +0000

[...] is that speed, memory use and overall performance are all vastly improved in this version. Read the recent report by Mozilla’s Stuart Parmenter for the nitty-gritty details about the browser’s performance [...]

By: PocketChalker

PocketChalker — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 10:46:25 +0000

Ok…as an example….I went and ate breakfast…

My Memory usage is now 308,812
315,424
321…

It’s growing fast now….

By: PocketChalker

PocketChalker — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:53:51 +0000

This is really interesting…I just come across this because I finally decided to search out why my FF3.0.1 is leaking so much memory….I start out using about 100mb(i’m extension heavy) and now, after searching this out for about 15minutes I’m sitting at 183,280mb. I have 7tabs open and one has a little flash going on. I guarantee that within an hour, if I just let it sit here…I’ll be at about 360,000mb. I left it up and open over night with only one tab open, gmail…and woke up to over 500,000mb in memory used. I just don’t get it.

I’m definitely NOT a beta tester because I do not under how all the stuff works on the back end….Wish I did….

Any recommendations? Is there a list somewhere that has all the extensions with memory leaks?

Thanks for a great browsing experience FF. I really couldn’t live without You

PocketChalker

By: robg

robg — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:35:33 +0000

i’m, uh, shocked at this koolaid drinking on FF3′s performance. Fixed the memory issues? You’re joking? FF3 is using far, far more memory than FF2 did for me on my very standard Dell/XP machine. FF3 regularly gobbles the CPU and essentially shuts down my machine for about 60 seconds at a time. This is not an improvement but a huge frustration. Every actual user I know has the same story. Back to FF2 for me.