More People are Experiencing Firefox Issues

Not too long ago I mentioned all the problems I have been having with the latest incarnation of the (once great) web browser, Firefox. I have figured out that the issues aren’t plugins, add-ons, or themes but very poor memory management, in a nutshell, bad programming. I have tweaked and fiddled with Firefox all I can, but the memory issue lingers thus causing all kinds of issues with my Firefox experience.

In my original post on the issue, Firefox 2: Slower than Predecessor, there were quite a few comments with suggestions. One suggestion was to dump Firefox for Opera; while I am not pleased with Firefox I’m not ready to get rid of it, yet. I have already axed Winamp from my software library due to its horribly slow offerings though, so Firefox could be close behind.

Asa Dotzler stopped by and mentioned that they have had no mention of scroll wheel issues through their feedback channels. A commenter said, “I have that exact same mouse scroll wheel problem with FF2. Glad it’s not just me…” But, the scroll wheel issue is tied to memory use. I have trimmed the fat out of Firefox and excessive amounts of memory are still being consumed.

Cpl M commented on the fact that he too is experiencing, “horrible problems with Firefox and memory issues both at home and work.” He also went on to say, “I’ve tried the extension test in the past, but didn’t get definitive results. [...] FF1 had memory issues as well.”

Today, Ron Schenone has written what he thought was a fix to his Firefox memory issues and I am forced to inform him that hibernation, while it is a large consumer of memory, is not the reason for his problems with Firefox. He states, “Theory. I think Firefox, from what I have read, still has some memory issues. But closing it seems to resolve the problem.” Obviously, if a program is sucking up memory, closing or killing it will eliminate the problem. That’s not really a theory, it’s a fact. I occasionally have to kill scripts on Linux servers when those scripts run out of control then I have to go in and figure out why that script was utilizing too much memory and fix the problem (just like Mozilla and the Firefox developers need to do).

The problem is that no web browser should ever use more than 128 MB of RAM, ever. The only reason why one instance of a program designed to look at HTML, XHTML, XML, streaming music/video, and Flash should utilize more than 128 MB of RAM is because of bad programming. Ron Schenone stated his instance of Firefox was sucking up 152 MB of memory. I have seen instances on my laptop where Firefox is utilizing 200 MB or more of RAM. That’s a significant amount of memory to be used to look at web pages. This memory issue in Firefox has to get fixed and it has to get fixed soon if Firefox really wants to win a browser war.

What person in their right mind ever thinks, “I should close this web browser if I want to open INSERT PROGRAM NAME HERE.”

[tags]firefox, memory, RAM, asa dotzler[/tags]