Sometime in the next few days Mozilla will release Firefox 2.0 Alpha 1 (2.0a1). Let’s hope they fix the memory problems! Some new features that will appear in the alpha release include improvements to the “Places” infrastructure, extension blocklisting for those extensions with security problems, a search plugin format changeover, spell-as-you-type for English, an Atom feed parser, and improved feed detection. By the time 2.0 is released in its final version later this year it’ll also have anti-phishing technology. The current anti-phishing technolgy being tested is developed by Google…

Ben Goodger, a Firefox developer (and former Mozilla Foundation employee and now Google employee) said the reports of memory leaks in Firefox might actually be due to a caching feature. Firefox looks at total system memory and then decides how many rendered pages to cache. The more memory a system has the more it will cache, up to a maximum of 8 pages total.

That’s all fine and good, but I doubt that it causes massive amounts of memory usage. Goodger admits that Firefox does have memory leaks and that developers are working to reduce the number of leaks.

Well how leaky is it? Right now my Firefox browser has 18 tabs open. Nothing special going on in any of those tabs. For that, the browser is using 215MB of RAM ! About 103MB of that is real memory and the rest is virtual memory (disk-based swap space).

These guys need to get a good memory leak detection library and insert it into Firefox code to find these leaks, because using that much RAM for what it does is just flat out ludicrous.

Bottom line is this: Firefox is either a gigantic memory hog or it has more leaks than a fishing net, or it there are some really leaky extensions that I have in use — or all of that!

I’m going to disable all my extensions and see what happens.

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