Saturday, March 08, 2008

Why Firefox sucks up memory

I've switched to a program called "Camino" which uses the Firefox rendering engine but uses the native Quartz user interface code rather than XUL (a user interface descriptor language). What I've discovered is that its memory footprint is *much* smaller than Firefox's, and unlike Firefox, it doesn't leak memory. What this implies is that the culprit in Firefox's memory leak is XUL, not its rendering engine.

As for why I'm not using Safari, for some reason Safari goes into login loops with Hotmail. I then have to clean out Safari's cookies for Hotmail and re-login. It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft, being Evil(tm), didn't deliberately break their Javascript in order to send Safari into a tizzy, but the deal is that Camino works right with Hotmail, so... (shrug).

-- Badtux the Geeky Penguin

4 comments:

  1. Try Firefox 3. I am running beta 3 on my MacBook Pro and not only does it address many of the memory leak issues so it is much quicker and it is the best at passing the Acid 3 test (IE 6 and 7 by far the worst, then Safari, Opera, Firefox 2, Firefox 3) it looks damn nice in Leopard, the skin they have made makes the app look native.

    I have only experienced one issue with it so far, I couldn't open bookmarks, but a restart fixed that. And I generally keep several tabs open over the course of the work week. The only downside is the Web Developers Tool Bar isn't compatible with it yet.

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  2. I didn't know that it did. I surf the net with both Explorer and Firefox browsers open at the same time and haven't had any problems.

    But I did double the memory when I bought this new computer. I haven't tried some of the other programs, if what I have works for me there is no point, I have other things to do with my time than spend more time at a computer.

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  3. wow - thanks for the great info...

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  4. Ditto on Firefox3 - it rocks on the Mac - give it a try.

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