How much memory does Firefox and other browsers use.

I'm up to 175,000k. Seems like a lot since AOL only uses a third to run all their software and IE7 uses about 35,000k.

I thought they were coming out with a fix for this. I have ver. 2.0.0.11

 

I had Notebookreview opened in all three; IE, FF, O. In task manager IE read ~3.5 MB, Opera read ~4.5 MB, and Firefox with no plug-ins read ~52 MB.

Those vary wildly for each browser by session, though. So don't draw any conclusions. That was with each just started and with this site being the first page opened after the home page, also the same on all three.

 

Firefox caches a lot if you happen to have a lot of memory. If your other apps are using more memory then Firefox will back off. Bottom line, if your performance is unaffected you can ignore it.

 

From what I have noticed firefox(IE and Opera do this as well) only bloats up to more than 100mb of ram if you were visiting webpages that contain java or were using javascript. Firefox(IE and Opera) when encountering any form of java will start to gobble up memory. The only way to release it is to close and restart it.

I just did a test in IE 7, went to a webpage that uses java to show satellite loops and IE started to gobble up memory, right now it is using 109mb of memory after only two interactions with java. It doesn't release the memory either I have to close it so that it will go back to using normal amounts of memory.

 

I've had Firefox go up to 300 MB before in XP. That was earlier this summer, so around version 2.0.0.2. 1.5x had similar usage. Haven't used Firefox for several incremental releases, though.

It's not a problem so long as you have enough RAM - with 512 MB, 300 MB for Firefox was becoming a bit of a problem!

 

Under normal usage for me, FF will get about 75-100MB and IE will get about 25-50MB. But yeah, I've had FF run up to some ridiculously large numbers in the past.