I have long been a staunch defender of Firefox. It offers a clean interface, is true to standards, offers a wealth of extensions and supposedly offers high performance. But lately, I have gotten all the reason to get tired with this browser, especially it’s performance. And I’m surprised about this. Basically, what I’m experiencing is the dreaded memory leak. After using Firefox for an hour or so of surfing, the memory usage is normally between 400 and 500 MB! And at those levels, Firefox often start using a lot of processor power, for God knows what. It usually ends with a crashing Firefox. And in general, I have experienced a lot of crashes nowadays (a couple each day) – older versions of Firefox was much more stable. Worth noting is that my Firefox installation is clean and I only have a handful of extensions. I’m actually considering going over to another browser, and then it’s bad, because the alternatives are not really promising… the slogan “the browser, reloaded” suddenly has a different meaning to me – having to reload the program daily to clear memory leaks…
I’ve had a few problems of late myself, but not as bad as yours.
I suspect one of my extensions is causing the trouble, but I’ve been too lazy too start FF in safe mode to see if the problem replicates.
But after all the time I’ve spent tweaking it the way I like it, I’m not about to jettison the browser.
I tried Opera for about 2 minutes and hated it, and IE just irks the Hell out of me.
I’m hoping that extension updates will correct the bug that makes it crash.
I guess that I won’t scrap Firefox either after so long time. I just wish they could correct these problems – so many people are suffering from these severe memory leaks. If it’s an extension, there should be a control of how much memory it’s allowed to use. Thanks for the comment., by the way đ
I’m looking into it:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009749.html
http://www.squarefree.com/2006/01/13/memory-leak-detection-tool/
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,15479116