Firefox is a memory hog. There, I said it. Some of you might disagree, but the fact of the matter is that even though Firefox 4 (and soon 5) improve memory over say Firefox 3.x, it's still a real hog.
Thankfully, I'm not alone in the belief that SOMETHING must be done. Mozilla is now taking this very seriously and is starting a new effort called, 'MemShrink'. The goal of the group is to target the developer resources required to solve this nagging problem.
Now don't get me wrong, Mozilla has been fixing memory leak issues when they pop up. This new team holds the promise of not just fixing leaks, but of making the issue of memory use better.
It's no trivial task, memory isn't just a function of what Mozilla's code consumes. More often then not, purely coded JavaScript with recursive loops and other cycle hogging garbage can suck up memory and CPU. I know that since Firefox 3.6, Mozilla has separated out some processes, but maybe there is room for more of that.
The other issue has to do with target platforms. There are plenty of people out there at have 1 GB or less of RAM. As I'm writing this post now, Firefox 4.0.1 is consuming 633 MB on my machine and that's not abnormal. Simply put, it's just waaay too much RAM for a web browser.
Then again, if you've got 8 GB of DDR3 RAM, you likely aren't all that worried about using 633 MB for Firefox. So maybe it's just a question of focus. Is Mozilla still interested in the mainstream consumer?
Time will tell how effective the MemShrink effort is, but it's definitely a step in the right direction to solving a problem that Mozilla must fix.
Thankfully, I'm not alone in the belief that SOMETHING must be done. Mozilla is now taking this very seriously and is starting a new effort called, 'MemShrink'. The goal of the group is to target the developer resources required to solve this nagging problem.
"It's pretty clear by now that this is a much bigger problem than any one person can likely tackle," Mozilla Developer, Johnny Stenback wrote in a mailing list posting. "So to help get more attention to this issue we'll be starting up a MemShrink effort, where a group of people will get together to look at the big picture, triage bugs, investigate general approaches, and do some brainstorming."FINALLY!! Mozilla is taking very specific aim at this very serious issue.
Now don't get me wrong, Mozilla has been fixing memory leak issues when they pop up. This new team holds the promise of not just fixing leaks, but of making the issue of memory use better.
It's no trivial task, memory isn't just a function of what Mozilla's code consumes. More often then not, purely coded JavaScript with recursive loops and other cycle hogging garbage can suck up memory and CPU. I know that since Firefox 3.6, Mozilla has separated out some processes, but maybe there is room for more of that.
The other issue has to do with target platforms. There are plenty of people out there at have 1 GB or less of RAM. As I'm writing this post now, Firefox 4.0.1 is consuming 633 MB on my machine and that's not abnormal. Simply put, it's just waaay too much RAM for a web browser.
Then again, if you've got 8 GB of DDR3 RAM, you likely aren't all that worried about using 633 MB for Firefox. So maybe it's just a question of focus. Is Mozilla still interested in the mainstream consumer?
Time will tell how effective the MemShrink effort is, but it's definitely a step in the right direction to solving a problem that Mozilla must fix.
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