Firefox - it's a love/hate relationship
I first got hooked to Mozilla Firefox when it was called FireBird. Version 0.6, if I recall. I was fed-up with getting viruses and trojans via Internet Explorer, and didn't want to have Opera with all their ads.
I stopped using IE entirely, and Firefox became my one and only browser. I loved the idea of tabbed browsing, and the wonderful world of extensions. On the few occasions when I have no choice but to use IE (at a friend's, or at a cybercafe), I found the navigation cumbersome and icky.
Since switching over to Firefox, I've not had a single trojan virus on my computer. ActiveX is still a dangerous loophole exploited by hackers today.
Over the months, I've experimented with alternative browsers based on IE. They allowed greater flexibility with settings, and even tabbed browsing. But it's just not the same.
Now, I love Firefox, don't get me wrong. But, the last few versions have suffered badly from the dreaded memory leak. Basically, the program consumes mega loads of memory over a short period of heavy surfing. The current version, Firefox 1.5 is the worst offender yet. My latest record in terms of memory usage, was a whopping 800 MB of RAM, and over 1GB of Virtual Memory! Needless to say, Firefox crashed soon after. Now, in a perfect world, when you close a tab or window, you would expect the program to release the memory accordingly. But for some reason, this doesn't happen, and the memory use keeps on going higher and higher.
Now, I did a test run, opening tabs in both Opera and Firefox, and after surfing about 100+ pages on each, the memory usage was as follows:
Opera 90MB RAM/110MB Virtual
Firefox 200MB RAM/310MB Virtual
Disabling extensions brought it down somewhat, but it was still much higher than Opera's memory consumption. There is still a memory leak in Opera, but it's not as bad as Firefox 1.5.
Now, if the developers of Firefox can do something about the memory leak, I'll be happy to stick with Firefox... but, if they can't fix it, I will probably have no choice but to switch to Opera.
Google Search: Firefox Memory Leak
I stopped using IE entirely, and Firefox became my one and only browser. I loved the idea of tabbed browsing, and the wonderful world of extensions. On the few occasions when I have no choice but to use IE (at a friend's, or at a cybercafe), I found the navigation cumbersome and icky.
Since switching over to Firefox, I've not had a single trojan virus on my computer. ActiveX is still a dangerous loophole exploited by hackers today.
Over the months, I've experimented with alternative browsers based on IE. They allowed greater flexibility with settings, and even tabbed browsing. But it's just not the same.
Now, I love Firefox, don't get me wrong. But, the last few versions have suffered badly from the dreaded memory leak. Basically, the program consumes mega loads of memory over a short period of heavy surfing. The current version, Firefox 1.5 is the worst offender yet. My latest record in terms of memory usage, was a whopping 800 MB of RAM, and over 1GB of Virtual Memory! Needless to say, Firefox crashed soon after. Now, in a perfect world, when you close a tab or window, you would expect the program to release the memory accordingly. But for some reason, this doesn't happen, and the memory use keeps on going higher and higher.
Now, I did a test run, opening tabs in both Opera and Firefox, and after surfing about 100+ pages on each, the memory usage was as follows:
Opera 90MB RAM/110MB Virtual
Firefox 200MB RAM/310MB Virtual
Disabling extensions brought it down somewhat, but it was still much higher than Opera's memory consumption. There is still a memory leak in Opera, but it's not as bad as Firefox 1.5.
Now, if the developers of Firefox can do something about the memory leak, I'll be happy to stick with Firefox... but, if they can't fix it, I will probably have no choice but to switch to Opera.
Google Search: Firefox Memory Leak
posted by manic_depressive_1 at 5:01 AM
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