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Firefox 3.0 memory improvements - Fact or fiction?

By // June 18, 2008, 4:52 AM PST

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  • Loading Firefox 2.0 and going to the TR home page.

    Firefox 3.0 is supposed to represent a major improvement over Firefox 2.0 in many respects. One of the major improvements touted by Mozilla.org is in the area of memory usage. Firefox is a notorious memory hog with leaks galore. Has Firefox 3.0 fixed this? Not according to the simple and unscientific tests here.I started the test by simply loading Firefox 2.0 and navigating directly to the TechRepublic home page. As you can see, firefox.exe starts off consuming 37Mb of RAM.

  • Firefox 2.0 with all TR Tabs loaded.

    Next I opened every tab across the TechRepublic home page in a new tab by right clicking each option and selecting Open In New Tab.As you can see, the memory consumed quickly rises to 68Mb.

  • Firefox 2.0 with all tabs closed but one.

    Finally, I closed all of the open tabs and let the browser sit for about a minute back with the first homepage loaded only. As you can see, Firefox 2.0 still held on to 64Mb, failing to release 27Mb of RAM from its initial launch.

  • FireFox 3.0 on TR.

    Next, I did an install of Firefox 3.0 and repeated all of the above steps.As you can see, Firefox 3.0 starts off consuming almost 55Mb of RAM before I click the first link. That's an increase of 18Mb from Firefox 2.0.

  • Firefox 3.0 loading all tabs on TR.

    This time loading all tabs on TR, you can see Firefox 3.0's memory usage balloons as well, this time to almost 82Mb.

  • Firefox 3.0 after unload tabs.

    I closed all tabs on TR again except the home page. Like Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0 failed to release all of the RAM back. It held on to 74Mb, 19Mb more than it did when it first loaded the page.Compared to Firefox 2.0, Firefox seized more memory to do the same job and refused to let go less of it when the tabs were closed.

  • Similar Results

    The next 6 screens show similar results under openSUSE 10.3 on a different machine.
    The first 3 screens show memory usage in Firefox 2.0, the last 3 memory usage in Firefox 3.0. As on the Windows XP screens before, you can see that Firefox 3.0 takes more memory than Firefox 2.0 and refuses to let it go.

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Loading Firefox 2.0 and going to the TR home page.

Firefox 3.0 is supposed to represent a major improvement over Firefox 2.0 in many respects. One of the major improvements touted by Mozilla.org is in the area of memory usage. Firefox is a notorious memory hog with leaks galore. Has Firefox 3.0 fixed this? Not according to the simple and unscientific tests here.I started the test by simply loading Firefox 2.0 and navigating directly to the TechRepublic home page. As you can see, firefox.exe starts off consuming 37Mb of RAM.

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