While Firefox enthusiasts swear that the web browser is the best invention since sliced bread or the scientific calculator, there’s no question that Firefox can be a bit of a memory hog. When you load your first window, the browser zips along smoothly. But open a few more tabs, do a little navigating back and forth, and before you know it Firefox is eating up half of your system’s RAM.
Mozilla has long insisted that this isn’t a “memory leak” bug, per se, but rather a way to ensure that Firefox opens pages at blazing fast speeds. That’s because an awful lot of information is kept in cache.
But bug or no bug, as Mozilla tries to figure out how to cram Firefox onto mobile phones, 200MB+ memory requirements just aren’t going to cut it. Mozilla developer Stuart Parmenter has posted an interesting analysis of Firefox memory use on his blog. And Mozilla board member Christopher Blizzard suggests that over the next few months, we’ll see developers tackling the memory use issue a bit more aggressively.
Of course, it’s possible that reducing memory use will also reduce performance, so we may eventually see a version of Firefox with a smaller memory footprint for mobile devices, with a fuller-fledged version for desktop use.
Comments