Sean's Blog

I’ve noticed that Firefox is only using a third of the memory it was using before, so I’m down to about 115,000K instead of 350,000K. You have to take what victories you can get.

Other factors in the memory issue:

• I am using the Tab Mix Plus extension, and that probably accounts for a bit. I only say this because TM+ has a session saver as well as a undo tab deletion feature. I’m sure options like that require a bit of information to be stored in memory.
• The amount of memory Firefox uses is also dependent on the websites that are loaded. I run into the most issues with large memory issues at work, probably on account of the pages I have open.
• A direct comparison with IE isn’t fair, as IE is integrated with the operating system, and chances are, some of the memory is uses is hidden elsewhere. A quick check of a personally calculated total of memory usage is about 70 below the amount listed by Task Manager.

Since the computers I tend to work on have 512 MB or more of memory, it isn’t too big of an issue. I’m sure there’s some setting or chunk of code that’s causing the issue that will be worked out sometime soon. Hell, I’ve used Windows for so long it doesn’t really bother me.

Since Firefox 1.5 was released, I’ve had issues with my memory usage for Firefox running up my memory anywhere from 200,000K to 350,000K range. Yes, that’s up to 350MB just for Firefox. For all intents and purposes, that sounds like a memory leak to me.

After some Googling and other research, I found the cause of the memory issue. The current version of Adblock available on the Firefox extension page is 0.5.2.056. However, in the forums for Adblock, they have a link to a release of Adblock with the version of 0.5.2.056+. Yes, a damn plus. And so you don’t have to deal with this issue, the forum where I found it is here.