My frustrations with Mozilla Firefox have been on the rise lately, for instead of taking back the web, its been taking back me. Bugs, crashes and memory abuse: they’re all just piling up on top of each other like the dust on my desk because I’m too freaking lazy to clean it.
It started soon after the latest Firefox release, the browser would crash more frequently from some pages, especially those using flash. I’d go to interact with a flash object on the page and the browser would lock up and crash. These same applications, ironically, worked flawlessly in Internet Explorer.
Standby & Hibernation. When I put my computer into standby or hibernate it with Firefox still running, when I restore the system, everything will be back as it should, minus Firefox. It’ll be there, a huge white unresponsive screen and I’ll have to open task manager to end its process.
That isn’t just it though; as the title says, Firefox does make itself way too comfortable within your memory. It just goes in and takes what it wants, pretty much, with no concern on what you need, only how much you have.
For example, we’ll compare its memory usage between my desktop and my laptop:
Desktop (2048MB of RAM) : Firefox uses 150 (average)
Laptop (192MB of RAM) : Firefox uses 30 (average)
I have the same plug-ins running on both systems too, yes.
When I first launch Firefox on my desktop and open a few pages, it’ll be consuming only 60MB of memory. However, if I use it for a bit or even just let it idle, the memory usage will gradually increase. In the end, I’ll find myself losing nearly or over 200 Megabytes even after I close all of my open tabs.
For example:
-Just earlier I had about four tabs open. Firefox was using 220MB.
-It crashed from my page-traffic statistic graph for PCS on Facebook.
-I re-launched Firefox and chose to restore my previous session.
-Everything reloads as it was prior, and is only using 60 Megabytes.
If anyone has an explanation I’d sure love to hear it. I don’t see why and how I lose so much memory when I obviously don’t need to.
Discuss…
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Tags: Bugs, Firefox, Memory, Mozilla
Comments: 6 comments
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Sean
May 18th, 2008 at 9:29 am
I’ve had similar issues with crashing in certain situations, but I put those off as either the page being lame or my computer being lame.
Also, the Standby and Hibernation thing, I recalled having Firefox open once while playing a full screen game (Flyff, if memory serves) and when I finished up the game I came back to find Firefox in the white box of never respond, as I like to call it. Don’t hold me to that though, I don’t tend to keep Firefox up when playing games and it’s been a few months.
I haven’t taken careful observation, but I do notice Firefox taking large amounts of space, beating my other processes by AT LEAST about 30,000 K.
Andrew
May 18th, 2008 at 9:46 am
I usually keep Firefox open if it already is, while I’m playing games and when I return they’re fine.
Turbohog
May 18th, 2008 at 11:17 am
Weird. I don’t have any of those issues. Are you guys running the Firefox 3 Beta? I;m still using 2.0.0.14, and I have no problems. Try looking here to reduce the ram it uses or google about it:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_-_Firefox
ydb
May 18th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Don’t keep Firefox open when you’re playing games, the leakage can really cause problems.
If I remember correctly, back when I still had my PC I had exactly the same problems with Firefox 0.9 and 1.0 with memory leakage and return from sleep. Firefox for Mac also runs quite slowly at times.
I’d recommend that anyone tired of Firefox’s various problems use Opera or Safari (preferably Opera).
Andrew
May 18th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
well that was a good link. Turbohog wins the prize.
Turbohog
May 18th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Yay!
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