Is Firefox even more memory hungry in Vista

After sitting out the previous couple of upgrade cycles, I recently upgraded to a Dell 1520 with a 2.0 Core 2 Duo and 2 G of memory.

All is basically fine, but I can't believe how much memory Firefox is chewing up. I thought the memory leaks were fixed a few years ago.

However, I have the Multimeter going in Sidebar and I have watched with surprise memory use grow and grow. Checking Task Manger the culprit is FireFox, whihc grew to over 300 Megs after only a few hours of use. I have no Firefox plug-ins, extensions or themes.

I tried some of the old XP tricks, but it hasn't made a difference.

Anyone else notice this, and have a fix?

It's not like I'm running out of memory, but 300M is a tad too much.

 

I mostly use Opera these days, but from what I remember of Firefox in Vista, it used about the same amount of memory - not significantly more than in XP (which was already a pretty huge amount). 300 MB as a maximum is about what I remember for both XP and Vista.

 

Opera is more memory efficient.

Opera 9.5 is great, but it's still beta

 

I've never seen Firefox use more than 80MB or so. And this is despite having a good chunk of extensions installed, having 20 tabs open, and leaving the browser for days or weeks at a time.

I don't understand how some people manage the kind of memory usage you're talking about.

As for the memory leaks, it's still a bit iffy whether they are technically leaks in Firefox' case, but the big dirty secret of software development is that virtually all software leaks memory to some extent. The trick is to leak so little that the user doesn't notice it.

 

Yeah, Opera 9.5 for the win.

 

I have observed my firefox in vista climb to as high as 600mb of usage during a few times. THey happened when I had around 15 tabs open.

 

All tabbed browsers will do that, IE7 and Opera included. Though I don't think I've seen quite that much from Opera, even with that many tabs open. Depends also on what you have in the tabs.

 

Firefox itself doesn't really have the memory issues. It's usually blame to the extensions that may or may not be as well coded as they should be.

 

Me either I stay online all day with 8 or more tabs open at a time I only have 256MB RAM in this old desktop but, memory usage for Firefox is always below 30MB which is less then IE(opera too) on the same system.

 

I'm one more crash and/or huge memory leak from giving up firefox and using Opera 9 and my default browser instead. I even tried uninstalling all my plug-ins and it's still problematic. I don't mind FF being a resource hog when that's all I'm doing, but it becomes a pain when Multitasking.

 

i usually see around 60-80 here.. depends on how many tabs are open. i like opera but its not as compatable from my experiences as ff is with many web sites.

 

The memory use depends a lot on not just the number of tabs you have open, but what sites you are visiting. I would first point the blame at most of the web 2.0 sites like gmail, digg, etc... that make extensive use of javascript for their applications. Whenever I hit one of those sites, memory use goes up and the pages slow down.

 

orev what you are saying about javascript is correct (atleast from my experiences). I opened firefox then I went to a couple web pages that use java or have javascript embedded in them and now with 1 tab open firefox is using 155mb of memory . Each web page I went to that used java cause firefox to steal another 20mb+ of memory which it would not give back even when I left that web page. I have personally seen firefox use more than 200mb of memory on both XP and vista after going to a few web pages with java.

 

Don't open so many tabs that should help

 

sorry that reply wasn't for you I was trying to post it on a different subject my fault