Firefox 7 beta brings major cuts in memory usage

On my Debian Unstable system, my Firefox/Iceweasel process has been running since July 21st, and currently uses a bit over 2GiB of virtual memory (physical memory is reported as much less). With previous versions I noticed slowdowns after running for 5 days or so, necessitating quitting and relaunching it to get it working snappily again. But Version 5 already seems much better.

By the way, this reduced memory consumption in Firefox 7 seems to be mainly due to calling the JavaScript garbage collector more often. If JavaScript could introduce reference-counting of objects as a first resort to falling back to the garbage collector (à la Python and Perl), I think they could reduce its memory usage by heaps.

Thank you for firefox and i will stay with orca browser .yeah ,firefox 7.0 use memory less than 4.0 but half of my plug-ins don't work .i decide to give up firefox and switch to orca browser .

I opened 20 tabs of the inquirer main page for testing and RAM usage went up by 210 MB.
I don't understand why some people are having RAM issues with firefox.

I have 2G on my laptop and normally it runs firefox and a bunch of xterms connecting to remote systems.

firefox is enough of a memory hog that every night it runs the system out of memory and swap (a total of 4G on this box)

i very much look forward to firefox 7 and the decreased memory wastage.

I expect that this improvement will make my entire machine seem faster as less memory used == less swap used resulting in a much faster machine

Firefox is my favorite browser and I have no problems with it's usage of RAM. If you have two gigs which is a minimum these days, you won't be bothered by that.
Firefox is also almost bug-free now, so the only thing to improve, would be performance which is already quite acceptable.
Keep it up Mozilla guys and thanks.

I do wonder about this mania of people too, I seriously think some people just have taskmanager open 24/7 to stare at mem use.
I never had huge issues really but I don't for instance browse and play a game at the same time, when I'm browsing my computer is normally not doing anything else.
Note though that I understand that it WAS a real bug, it's just not one that I get why so many people are so hysterical about.

Incidentally, when at one time I did verify I noticed that things like my mouse driver (logitech) use insane amounts of RAM for what it's doing, and yet I never heard much bitching about that. and not just the mousedriver, lots of popular stuff are bizarre in reserving mem when there is no possible reason really, whereas a browser at least can use mem to cache stuff.

While memory usage has been a big issue for me with FF in the past, the most pressing issue is speed, or lack thereof. Have been using FF since 1.5 but recently switched to Chrome and will never go back. No more DNS lockups EVERYTIME I try to log into Yahoo.

I've found a new browser and am sticking with it!

Why IE6? Because 20MB of Ram was considered normal for a browser BACK IN 2001. Though even then, that was pretty low. Nowadays, think 100, 200MB and up for a lot of tabs. It's the norm.
Why is that you ask? How can 100kb of HTML turn into 100MB in memory?
Well, first off, there's the browser itself, which is growing in size constantly because of added complexity with all the luxury we expect from them nowadays.
Then there's the content itself. You write p Hello! /p , which is 13 bytes in any sane coding. Your browser parses this into a HTML DOM object and a Javascript object. Complete with positioning and state info and hundreds of possible CSS properties attached.
And don't forget images, which are sent compressed and usually expand to roughly 10 times the size.
And scripts, which are stored in Ram, then JIT-compiled to run them faster and that code has to be put somewhere as well. And cached function calls. No seriously, to make your browser as fast as it is, they might cache things like 1+1, because it's slow to retrieve both operands from somewhere. Today, Javascript is everywhere and there's so much more of it. Even Wikipedia has some. It's actually rare to find a page that doesn't use any, whereas 10 years ago, it wasn't.

So, speed in general is your best explanation. When you ask a program to do more in less time, the obvious answer is to use more memory.

ps: IE9 does not use 21MB on wikipedia.org. I don't want to know out of whose ass you pulled that number. It uses way more than that. Plus, like all other IEs before it, it uses Windows components that don't necessarily show up in task manager.

pps: Both Chrome and IE9 aren't reported very well by the task manager, since it adds shared storage to each processes consumption. For 3 tabs, IE9 is still much worse than Chrome and Firefox 7 when only counting private memory.

I don't think that many people think IE6 when IE is mentioned these days. But your missing my point. What on earth is Firefox doing with all that memory in the first place? If it's caching then it's the most absurd cache ever.

Running:

"Firefox.exe www.wikipedia.org"

brings up a Firefox process that the task manager says has allocated 75MByte of RAM. There's no way on earth anything useful can be said about the webpage "www.wikipedia.org" that requires that much memory. The few 100kbyte that the pages constitutes does not make use of Flash or other memory hogging plugins.

So if there's precious little to cache and nothing to run, what's the point of Firefox allocating all that memory? On a battery powered device that would be massively draining of battery life. Reserving that much memory without good reason just steals the RAM away from other applications that could perhaps make better use of it, slowing them down instead.

Doing the same thing with iexplore.exe for IE9 shows a pair of processes which between them have allocated 21MByte of RAM, which is still enourmous for the needs of the page but still well under a third of that which Firefox deems necessary.

So by this crude measurement Mozilla's aim to achieve a 20-30% saving would not reduce its consumption to that of IE. Mozilla must be doing really bad if MS can out code them by that much.

Like others have said, browsers could be using memory to cache information etc. And if you have 8 gb of ram and a slow disk, it could very logical to use lots of memory.

I think picking a browser because of how much memory it uses is pretty silly unless you're machine is very memory constrained.

any issues with RAM usage but maybe this is due to the way Windows/MS trained me to overload my PC with RAM.
ff- the best browser out there

@Tamath: That is actually one of the most ridiculous claims I've heard in a long time. You ditched Firefox 3.6, the least memory-hungry browser in its day for Chrome, which has an ENORMOUS memory-overhead due to using one process per tab.
Be honest, you didn't move to Chrome because it was oh-so memory efficient. You went with it because it was way, WAY faster and didn't care one bit if it used more memory.

@bazza: What IE do you mean? IE6? Modern browsers use memory for caching mostly. May it be the actual content or results of Javascript function calls. The more you put in memory, the faster your browser becomes. Plus, more scripts, more complex CSS and support for many things like SVG, JSON etc. don't make your footprint smaller.

I find it staggering how much memory any browser uses for what should be really trivial stuff. Right now I've got one webpage open, the Flash-less Wikipedia English home page. Total memory in IE, 21 MByte. Firefox, 90 MByte. I don't understand why IE needs 21 MByte, but Firefox is inexplicable in comparison. How can only a few 100kbyte of download bloat up to *that* much? A reduction of 20-30% will not result in impressive efficiency.

As one of the many useres who ditched FF for Chrome (I did at Firefox 3.6 or so) I have to say they've waited far, far too long to even try and fix this issue.

Thanks but no thanks Mozilla, the fact you waited this many YEARS to even acknowledge the problem, let alone fix it, speaks volumes about the quality.

Finally FF lovers have something to be proud and happy about. well done FF. Its better late than never