For those who like to experiment with the ‘latest and greatest’, the Firefox 3 - Beta 2 - has been released. One of the anticipated issues is that the memory usage has been addressed. This has been a longstanding complaint with Firefox users (myself included):

“…Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation. Beta 2 includes over 30 more memory leak fixes, and 11 improvements to our memory footprint.”

link: Firefox 3 Beta 2 Release Notes

One of the ways that some have addressed the memory problem has been to close Firefox and restart it again in order to reclaim the memory. The frequency of doing this depends on your computer resources. It would be wonderful if the memory issues were resolved and this restart routine is relegated to developmental history.

Catherine