Firefox 2.0 and possible memory leak?

[reubs]

I've been running FF 2.0 for about a week now, and I've noticed things being very sluggish. RAM usage goes through the roof and my windows don't minimize smoothly anymore...by this, I mean when I click the yellow button the window decreases in a very jagged way.

That's all I've got time for now. Let me know if anyone else has experienced such problems.

I'm running 10.4.7 on a 1.83 Macbook w/ 2 gigs of RAM, btw.

Thanks.

 

[jessep28]

Firefox is known to be a memory hog, however I have 2GB or RAM on my iMac and I don't experience the problems you describe.

Did you just upgrade to 2.0 from a previous version? If so, then I would recommend a clean uninstall and reinstall. I think a simple overwrite upgrade is causing problems with a few people. This will require you to delete both the application and support file.

Before you do this, export your bookmark

1) In Firefox, Go to Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks
2) Go to File > Export

After that delete the program and app support file:

1) Delete Firefox from Application Folder like a normal uninstall
2) Go to Home Folder > Library > Application Support
3) Delete the Firefox folder

Reinstall Firefox, then import the bookmarks back

1) Go back into Organize Bookmarks
2) Go to File > Import
3) Import the bookmarks from the location you saved when you exported them

I hope that helps.

 

[DerChef]

Firefox is overrated rubbish from the everything thats open source must be great camp

This thing is based on NETSCAPE GECKO which was simply awful and allowed microsoft to dominate the browser market

Versio 1.x was notorious for its memory leaks

and even it verion 2.0 it does not support imbedded AVI's in web pages natively (is that some kind of joke )

On the Mac stick to Safari and on the PC I.E. 7

 

[NJuul]

Best to ignore above post, I think.

Have you been running firefox constantly for one week? Like, without restarting it?
Because if you do, be it safari or firefox, they'll eat up your RAM 'till there's nothing left. If you simply restart your browsers once a day, they'll do fine.

 

[Sesshi]

I have to say that prior to 2.0 Firefox was rock solid on Windows and somewhat flaky under OS X. Since switching versions it's become pretty much 50:50. I've had two crashes each under either platform so far. Both are real memory hogs, but I've not had excessive slowdowns as described - and I hammer Firefox with multiple tabbage on both platforms.

I wonder if going up to .8 will do anything. That's what I'm at.

 

[Westside guy]

I'm not crazy about Firefox on the Mac - but I keep coming back to it. For Web development it's the best tool available, what with the DOM inspector and especially the Javascript console (I know Webkit now has a similar tool, but I find it a pain to use).

As far as memory leaks go - in my experience it's usually not the browser itself; it can usually be pinned down to a plug-in or extension that's been added. If you use extensions like Greasemonkey, for instance, I would not be surprised if that's the culprit. Also Flash (and Java) seems to drive my Firefox memory footprint up significantly, and it stays there even after I'm off the page using that technology.

 

[clevin]

why don't you post a screenshot showing your activity monitor, lets see how much RAM/CPU is firefox 2 using.

 

[reubs]

Well I did some research (and by research, I mean opening activity monitor), and it appears I falsely accused FF b/c of their past memory problems. Turns out, it's Neooffice that's chewing up a lot of RAM (about 1.24 gigs of Virtual RAM). I've been doing a lot of work w/ word processing lately, and that's what has been the RAM hog. Now I guess I am looking for a non-bloated word processing alternative.

 

[Warbrain]

Firefox is overrated rubbish from the everything thats open source must be great camp

This thing is based on NETSCAPE GECKO which was simply awful and allowed microsoft to dominate the browser market

Versio 1.x was notorious for its memory leaks

and even it verion 2.0 it does not support imbedded AVI's in web pages natively (is that some kind of joke )

On the Mac stick to Safari and on the PC I.E. 7

Are you kidding me? You have no idea what you're talking about. Netscape only provided primary funding for the development of Gecko. Netscape never used it until version 6, and at that point IE already had control. The reason why IE took over was because of the fact that Netscape focused more on suing Microsoft rather than compete.

Version 1.x was bad at first, but got a whole lot better considering memory leaks. I would expect the same could be said for 2.0.

There is no reason to believe that Safari and IE 7 are the end-all for browsers on either platform. I wouldn't use IE on a PC if my life depended on it. It's terrible. I try to avoid using Safari as much as possible because it's getting to be just as bad as IE on Windows. People can use whatever browser they want, but to say that Safari and IE 7 are the best bets just dumb and wrong.

 

[bousozoku]

Well I did some research (and by research, I mean opening activity monitor), and it appears I falsely accused FF b/c of their past memory problems. Turns out, it's Neooffice that's chewing up a lot of RAM (about 1.24 gigs of Virtual RAM). I've been doing a lot of work w/ word processing lately, and that's what has been the RAM hog. Now I guess I am looking for a non-bloated word processing alternative.

NeoOffice being mostly Java application is going to take lots of virtual memory because the JVM takes lots of virtual memory. The more Java applications you have open the better it looks because the big drain generally is spread out.

With another Java application open, NeoOffice was taking 685.36 MB of virtual memory. The other was taking 395.80 MB.

Good luck with non-bloated word processing, I think you'll find that high-function software is all pretty bloated. Even TextEdit took 147.68 MB of virtual memory for me.

 

[thebeephaha]

Firefox is overrated rubbish from the everything thats open source must be great camp

This thing is based on NETSCAPE GECKO which was simply awful and allowed microsoft to dominate the browser market

Versio 1.x was notorious for its memory leaks

and even it verion 2.0 it does not support imbedded AVI's in web pages natively (is that some kind of joke )

On the Mac stick to Safari and on the PC I.E. 7

Thats BS...

Firefox CAN play AVI's and if anyone ever recommends IE 7 again I think I'm going to shoot myself in the kneecaps.

 

[DerChef]

Thats BS...

Firefox CAN play AVI's

Exactly How without some without some very dodgy unsupported plugins. You click the embedded Avi and it can find a suitable plugin.

These forums are peppered at the moment with people with firefox 2 issues .

And another thing I see Firefox 2 has suddenly stopped working with the web accelerator Onspeed.

 

[TrenchMouth]

without turning this into a 'which browser is teh win' thread, i thought i would share some 50% anecdotal 50% empirical evidence.

i currently and in the past have used as my default browser safari, camino and FF2

today i went ahead and launched all three, sent them all to the same site and checked out how much memory they were using in activity monitor. i know a lot of things are machine specific, and there are plenty of variables that aren't being accounted for here, however!: safari and camino seemed to be using the least amount of physical memory, as well as VM. as well, safari seemed to be the least cpu hungry.

that being said, the advantages i get with FF are enough to warrant its usage over the other two (to the tune of site compatibility, and extensibility). so i am sticking with it for the time being.

 

[bousozoku]

Exactly How without some without some very dodgy unsupported plugins. You click the embedded Avi and it can find a suitable plugin.

These forums are peppered at the moment with people with firefox 2 issues .

And another thing I see Firefox 2 has suddenly stopped working with the web accelerator Onspeed.

Perhaps, Onspeed has stopped working because it doesn't know about Firefox 2 yet?

Until MS remove ActiveX from their browser, it will always be much more risky because security is not a serious part of the ActiveX/OLE 2 design. Of course, people should have their browser set to not automatically accept ActiveX controls but a lot of people just click until the dialogues stop appearing anyway.

I suppose I'm just lucky but I'm using nightly builds of the Firefox 2 browser and have not encountered the various problems people are seeing but Mozilla should have checked for data corruption before letting the browser work normally.