Dear Internet, Firefox handles memory better than you think
Not a week goes by when I don’t hear someone say or write:
“Firefox sucks, it’s full of memory leaks, I have to restart it like every few hours!!!1”
Then we engage in a complex computer science-y analysis of what exactly is behind this. Bad programming? Feature bloat? Mozilla sold out to Microsoft?
Few realize that Firefox’s ability to open many many tabs, not Firefox’s memory handling, is what’s responsible for these “issues”.
Before Firefox, you were forced to keep your IE/etc windows lean because having 15 of them open cluttered up everything and made the machine you were using useless.
With Firefox, that’s no longer a problem as they sit neatly in your single window. Except that they still demand plenty of memory, CPU and other resources because they are fine & capable browser windows containing lots of flash, images and text… which leads us to this “memory issue”.
Yes, keep less tabs open and you will find Firefox surprisingly efficient.
Yours truly,
Common Sense
— fascinated