Firefox memory leaks are a ‘feature'

Writing in his bog, the lead engineer for Firefox, Ben Goodger, said that while it was true that Firebadger did leak a bit, it was a common problem in software this complicated.

He said that most of the people who moaned about memory leakage on Fireferret 1.5 failed to realise that what they were complaining about was actually a ‘feature' of the software. Goodger said that to improve performance when navigating Firefox 1.5 uses a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last few session history entries.

He said that this can mean that Firefox can end up storing a lot of data, but it did give the browser faster navigation speeds.

Firebadger has a preference browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers file which by default is set to -1. This will mean that by default you will save eight pages of information. If you want to save memory you can set it to 0 but your page load performance will suffer, he said. µ