Tet's Journal: Firefox memory usage

I make no secret of the fact that I think Firefox is a poor excuse for a browser. It just happens to be the best of the bad bunch that is currently available. Apparently, great strides have been made in terms of memory usage with firefox 3. And to give them credit, that does seem to be mostly true. It does appear less memory hungry than earlier versions. But I still had to kill it off this afternoon, when the firefox process had grown to 2.4GB. That was a bit of a problem on a machine with 2GB of physical RAM. Swapping never makes for a pleasant desktop experience...

Better than it used to be...

[johndiii]

...but still not great. With seventy-odd tabs open (perhaps a bit excessive), I see 417MB used. That's about 60% of what I was seeing with Firefox 2. I'm a bit curious how you could get up to 2.4G. What sort of browsing does that represent?

Re:

[Captain Splendid]

Yeah, what johndiii said! I've had well over a hundred tabs open and not seen anywhere near that memory usage.

What, you have like every page of Wikipedia open simultaneously? ;)

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[Shadow Wrought]

Wow. Can I ask what all you have open and how you manage to find the right page?

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[johndiii]

They're all in a particular order. Mostly things that I opened and did not want to forget. I could bookmark them, but then I would just forget. Let's see... There's the home page for a Yahoo group that I moderate, XKCD, my Plurk page, Gmail, ten or so Slashdot pages (mostly friends), a couple of news sites, local weather, a chess site, assorted poetry sites and poems that I like, a few Flickr photos that I like, my Yahoo mail page, a few blogs that I follow, a couple of Wikipedia pages that I want to fo

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[Captain Splendid]

I could bookmark them, but then I would just forget.

Same here. Tabs has near-obviated my need for bookmarks.

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[jawtheshark]

Yeah... My firefox usually stays under 100Meg usage. I only have one extension: Adblock and that's it. Between 5 and 10 tabs open.

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[lab16]

Wow. Can I ask what all you have open and how you manage to find the right page?

One way that I deal with large number of tabs is an extension called tab mix plus. One of its settings allows for multiple rows of tabs. So when you have a large number of tabs open it will just add a second row just below your first full row, rather than hide some of them and make you scroll through them. I also like it because it shows the page loading progress bar on the tab itself and shows tabs that haven't been viewed yet as red and italicized, among other things as well.

How many

[tqft]

How many tabs?
How many and which extensions?

Those using a few tens/hundred+ tabs are gonna love or hate the ctrl-tab feature in ff3.1