firefux
posted February 07, 2006 at 09:05 pm
Over the past month or so, my laptop has just been behaving horribly in terms of memory; and it started to dawn on me that the problems coincided with my upgrade to Firefox. Then I read on someone else's blog that he was having trouble with Firefox 1.5 too. Aha! So, it's not just me?!?
So, I Googled Firefox 1.5 problems and found a lot of familiar sounding stuff: huge amounts of memory being chewed up by my favorite browser (and it wouldn't give it back even if you closed tabs and such), freezing, crashes for no obvious reason. But the folks at Mozilla don't seem entirely convinced there is a problem, or if so, what the cause might be.
I've been trying various things I've found through the search results, but so far, the memory hogging (at some points, close to 200MB worth!) has continued to plague me and my poor laptop. It took me forever to give up Internet Explorer in favor of Firefox and now I may be forced to switch again. Waaaaah!
Comments
I don't know what sort of things you'll have heard on the street (since I'm afraid the only leaks I'm interested in are repeatable ones, and ones my friends have), so this may be repetition, but... how would I know?
First step: make sure all your extensions are updated, and then disable them all. Odds are really good that the most extreme leaks just disappeared (and if not, it's probably a plugin, like Flash): Firefox itself leaks, but usually not like a sieve unless you've got a regular always-open page that triggers something odd.
Then, re-enable the one you are missing the most, and run with just it for a while, then disable it again and run with just the next most essential, until you're sure nothing in your basic set leaks on its own. Then run with the two you need the most together, and keep on with that suffering and missing things until you find that, for instance (I'm pretty sure I've heard this is a deadly combo, though searching would probably tell you better than my memory) Session Saver and AdBlock together piss memory away, even though they're both fine on their own.
One other thing you can do to sometimes make life more tolerable while it's leaking madly and you're just trying to get something done: use about:config to create a boolean pref named config.trim_on_minimize and set it to true: Firefox will be a little slower to come back when you restore it from being minimized, but when things are bogged down to almost a standstill, a quick {Windows key}+M will cut Firefox down to size, and while some leaks will just roar back, some won't.
Or, if you're not using Firefox for philosophical reasons, switch to Opera: it's a heck of a nice browser, once you've spent a little time customizing the UI into something tolerable.
Wow, I didn't realize it either until you just mentioned it. I have no problem with firefox on my desktop, but on the laptop it's killing me.
Thanks for the suggestions, Phil. I believe I only have imgLikeOpera on my laptop, so I'll try disabling it to see what happens.
Yeah. Opera is *so* much better. It's like firefox + IE :]
I didn't know these things happen with firefox though.
I seem to have no problem with it. BTW I have all three berowsers XD.
The huge-ass memory leak in Firefox has been on the developers list for a while, but there is an interesting explanation here of the particularly high memory consumption in Firefox 1.5, and how to throttle it a bit.
I had to stop using Firefox as my primary browser because it literally crippled my iBook until I had no choice but to pop the battery out. At the time I didn't realise it was Firefox and I blamed Murphy's Law among other things as the warranty had just expired!
I used to have that problem until I started clearing my download cache regularly. Now it purrs along nicely.
FireFox is rising, IE will not be the default browser anymore.
You could try Opera browser, if you want to have more pleasure of the web.
Opera is a bit faster than firefox and it is free.