Will Mozilla please fix the memory leak in Firefox?
We all love Firefox. I certainly do, and I use it everyday. However, I am finding myself leaning towards Safari / Webkit when I am using my Mac, simply because Firefox on the Mac is so sluggish. Not only that, the browser is now moving towards version 3, and a fix for the infamous Firefox memory leak is nowhere in sight (certainly not in version 2).
On the Mac, when I start-up Firefox and Safari / Webkit, both apps take up about 100MB of RAM. But after the CPU usage for Firefox always hovers around 20% even when idle, whilst Safari is using virtually no CPU. On a website with 3 standard rich-media ads, CPU usage on Firefox jumps up to 90% whilst on Safari it’s still not high, under the 10% mark.
That is a massive, significant difference and is one of the reasons why I’m finding Safari / Webkit to be slicker and faster although not as extensible as Firefox, which has thousands of add-ons for it.
After about half an hour of usage, Firefox starts to consume about 400MB of RAM, whilst Webkit at the moment is still just under 200MB of RAM.
Is the reason why Firefox is so sluggish is because it re-writes the broken HTML on a page? For some reason, it rewrites all the XHTML-correct < br /> to < br >, rewrites all the < img /> tags, and adds < tbody > tags to tables. Why? It’s going down the route of Internet Explorer where the browser is correcting incorrect HTML and not breaking the page visually, which will actually force the designers to correct the flaws in their markup.
Mozilla, please sort these issues out. I love your browser, but the issues I’ve highlighted above are making me feeling more and more disillusioned about my Firefox experience each day.
April 8th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
Forget that - check this out:
http://webkit.org/blog/100/webkit-shutting-down/
I nearly had kittens (yes, more). Does this mean that Safari is going suck in all the awful XHTML support!? Crap!
Then read the comments.
April 8th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
The first thing I looked at was the date.
And to be honest, I still prefer Firefox overall as long as they sort those issues out, so won’t be too bothered if Webkit was indeed shut down.