Monday, January 23, 2006

FireFox - The hungry-hungry hippo

this post is in reference to Raymond Lewallen's post about FireFox consuming way too much memory, I have been experiencing this myself for a while, but hadn't seen anyone else complain, I don't use any extension which is what some people are saying would cause the problem

at home (I have WXP) I use Internet Explorer 7 and it works great, there are some issues with some sites that just won't work with IE7 so I end up using FF from time to time
at work however I use W2000 so I use FireFox

but after seeing all the responses to Raymond's post, that's it, I'm trying Opera, I have heard many good things about this browser for a long time, I think I tried it once and didn't like it, we'll see this time
Posted by BlackTigerX at 9:15 AM

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here's a screenshot of my task manager:
http://www.whiteacid.org/misc/firefox.jpg

The way to make the memory taken shoot up is by having firefox view lots of images, as in hundreds.

I had spoken to people about this but they said that firefox is made to take up memory to reduce the amount it has to use the cache but it's also made to happily give up the memory if another program wants it. This sounds a little fishy to me but I have no evidence one way or the other. Of course the browser is open source so it could be determined, I just don't have the time or the know-how.

1/26/2006 12:20 PM
BlackTigerX said...

holy cow!
771KB eaten by a single program, have you considered/tried other browsers?
I'm still trying Opera, the memory is not as bad as FireFox, but so far I still like IE7 better, the only problem (for me) is that it only works on Windows XP+

on the downside Opera has
- some horrible flickering problems when refreshing some pages
- quite often is very slow
- many pages will not display *correctly*, and I don't care that the page is not correct html format, if the same page looks good in IExplorer and FireFox, I expect the same page to look good in any other browser that is trying to compete
- many shortcuts that work on IExplorer and FireFox just don't exist or work in a different way
- the way it uses MDI windows is just ugly
- some configuration options are way too complicated; this last two I find weird, because I has quite a few very good UI elements

on the good side
- it doesn't consume as much memory
- I like the context menu options
- you can close the tabs without having to go to the far right X
...

so still FireFox is a very good browser, but the memory issue is a very big one, IE7 is really good too, but is still not officially out, and we probably won't get a version for Windows 2000

1/28/2006 9:51 AM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)