Firefox Memory Leak is a Feature

SenseOfHumor writes "The Firefox memory leak is not a bug. It's a feature! The 'feature' is how the pages are cached in a tabbed environment." From the article: "To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited less than 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last five session history entries for each tab. This is a lot of data. If you have a lot of tabs, Firefox's memory usage can climb dramatically. It's a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web."

What a small world

[Rude Turnip]

Did the Mozilla Foundation hire the same PR firm that Microsoft uses?

My boss doesn't agree..

[lbrandy]

My bos doesn't agree at all. I tried including this feature in several of my builds. My company is so regressive, we have alot to learn from the leaders like Firefox.

In other news...

[GillBates0]

...scientists have determined that the human appendix is not an evolutionary anomaly as previously thought, but an intelligent design feature aimed at keeping the humans guessing as to it's actual function.

And in totally unrelated news, the Mozilla foundation recently announced that their flagship browser Firefox shall soon be renamed to Bigfoot, to reflect the software's large memory footprint.

More breaking news on these topics at 11.

Re:Total cached page limit.

[Anonymous Crowhead]

I have a little trick I use from time to time with firefox:

[user@localhost ~]$pkill -9 firefox

I use it once a day at least.

Re:spyware with IE or memory leak with FF..

[crabpeople]

How can you trust the CEO after he didnt swim across the ocean?

i could never stand behind a company like that and refuse to use opera products untill he makes good on his word. You cant just throw statements like that around. Browsers designed by liars are dishonorable browsers.

Re:releasing memory

[Profound]

>> That's one reason why a Java or C# app can actually out-perform a similar C/C++ app

Maybe in theory, but in practice 99.9% of the world uses C++ browsers because the Java ones suck.

Re:Total cached page limit.

[kjots]

I'd rather ad a second gigabyte of memory before I tried upgrading my CPU.

Please hand in your geek card. You just failed.

(For those of you playing at home, the correct answer is "I would rather add a second gigabyte of memory and upgrade my CPU")

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:How nice.

[Bloke down the pub]

Why is the option to *disable* it hidden in an advanced configuraiton screen that most users don't even know exists?

So that teh 733t h4x0rz can laugh at n00b5 who didn't know about it.

Re:So I'll be the first to say it....

[dzfoo]

>> Why does Opera do the same thing faster without the memory penalties?

Magic!

            -dZ.