schapel wrote:It won't be fixed until someone describes how to see the problem so we can write a bug report.
Fair point.
schapel wrote:I find that Firefox tends to use less memory than other browsers, and can't reproduce the problem you describe no matter how hard I try.
That hasn't been my experience. I use 2 browsers on my system, Maxthon & Firefox 1.5.0.8 [I tried 2.0, but when I installed it, 1 of my extensions that I use a
lot was disabled by Firefox because it apparently wasn't compatible, despite the plugin's info page saying it was
]. At the moment Firefox has been running since some time last night [my machine is on 24/7] & I currently have 43 tabs open, & according to Task Manager it's using 250+MB! I realise that it's possible some people might conclude that the memory useage is due to the number of tabs I have open, so I compared it to Maxthon.
As well as Favourites, Maxthon also has something called groups, where you can save a number of open tabs as 1 group so you can open them all together at a later point. I only had maybe 10-15 tabs open in Maxthon at the time, so obviously that wasn't a fair comparison. I closed all but 1 tab, then opened the largest group I had saved. After allowing all the tabs to load Maxthon now has 84 tabs open, but is only using about 23MB! Part of that is because Maxthon has some sort of feature to free up memory regularly. At its peak, whilst loading all those tabs it only went up to about 160MB, but even that's a pretty big difference compared to Firefox.
schapel wrote:Are there any hints you can give us?
I just tried starting up Firefox in safemode [I tend to type up forum posts in a seperate text editor, then just paste when I'm done], just the 1 tab open [basic html page on my HDD with some links], & according to Task Manager it's still using more memory than Maxthon [24,888K for Ff, vs 22,316K for Maxthon which still has 84 tabs open!]. 1 of the links on my start page is Wikipedia, so I went there & then just browsed at random. According to the dropdown list on the back button, I've browsed 15 pages after the Wikipedia home page, & Task Manager now reports memory at 39,512K.
Another 15 links/pages later = 47,272K
15 more = 65,612K
That's just with 1 tab open, & in Safe Mode. You can see how it can build up fairly quickly over a few hours normal usage.
schapel wrote:But actually the reason why Mozilla developers decided to drop support for MNG was to save on download size, not RAM usage. Personally, I think people are overly concerned with download size and startup time, for the simple fact that you download the full browser only once, and you start the browser only once a day. A few extra minutes downloading or a few extra seconds starting the browser really doesn't make much practical difference.
That just... boggles the mind. I can't believe they actually worry about their download being a few hundred KB bigger. I could
maybe understand if they were worried about bandwidth bills, if it weren't for the existence of bit-torrent.