Irfan’s Corner on the Web On Mac, Linux, Grid, Virtualization and Software Technology

Firefox 2’s Memory Management problems

I love Firefox! When Firefox 2 came out I loved its enhancements and wrote a rave about it! But now I'm considering the prospect of downgrading to Firefox 1.5 in my Windows XP installation on my Dell Inspiron 6400 notebook. Firefox2 takes an atrocious amount of memory, for example right now I have just 3 tabs open, and Firefox is taking 74MB of RAM:

I've seen Firefox using upwards of 140MB for less than 6 tabs in the past. Although my notebook has enough memory to spare but this is unacceptable, I really hope that Mozilla fixes these memory leak problems, otherwise reverse migrations to IE could be possible and the growth of Firefox could be stopped in its tracks. Initially when Firefox2 was released, I tested it on a Linux machine and the memory footprint was really small and I was over joyed! But now I'm disappointed! The problem is not uncommon, this guys here faces a 375MB hog, and here is a comparison between Firefox2 and IE memory usage, in which Firefox2 is clearly 'ahead' in consuming memory

Poor memory management plagues many open source projects: OpenOffice, KDE and Eclipse come to my mind. Wasn't it a hallmark feature of open source software to run on older hardware? What ever happened to the hacker ethic of squeezing every ounce of performance from a machine by building efficient software?