It looks like not only me feel Firefox that consumed too much memory than it should, Duncan Riley from techcrunch.com also feel the same way. This is snippet Duncan expressing his displeasure to what his beloved browser had become.
Then my love affair with Firefox started to end. Firefox 1.5 (and the earlier versions, I started at 0.7) never skipped a beat, and unlike IE it had tabs, which were a god send to me as it was to many others. Mozilla launched Firefox 2.0, and suddenly my internet experience started to sour. I’m a heavy tab user, so it’s not unusual for me to have 15, 20 and even more tabs open, it’s how I read my feeds in the morning, opening up the stories that interest me for later reading. Firefox had what has been called by others “memory leaks,” which in laymen’s terms meant that it tripped out your memory on a PC, froze up and crashed…and far too regularly. I became a Mac user this year, and the first thing I did when I started up OS X for the first time was to download Firefox, hoping that perhaps it was a PC problem. It wasn’t. Same memory problems, same crashes. Mac fanboys told me that it was my fault for using plugins, so I deleted Firefox and started again without the plugins. Same problems, constant freezing (even with 4gb on a MacPro) and crashes. I switched to Safari for a time, and as much as it was a decent browser, it doesn’t play nice with all sites, in particular with the WYSIWIG backend on Wordpress blogs. Then came Flock 1.0. I’d never been a Flock fan before, always believing it to be nothing more than Firefox with plugins (Flock is based on the Firefox engine). Having watched the demo at TechCrunch 40 I downloaded the beta of Flock 1.0 and surfed away without incident. Some how the folks at Flock had tweaked the underlying Firefox engine to stop the memory issues.
Firefox 3 Beta 1: The Memory Use Says It All
I also once, a Firefox fan until I found Maxthon. The main reason I switch browser is memory consuming. At that time I only have 512MB of RAM and I am heavy multi-tasking guy and heavy tab user. Usually my PC will on 24/7 so it is normal for me to have 30+ tabs with Maxthon, this something that I can call impossible with Firefox.
To give you some idea how different their memory consuming, I got screenshot for you.
As you can see from the screenshot above Firefox using nearly 50MB of memory and I just start it, with only one default tab opened while for Maxthon I have around 10 tabs opened.
If you know some dirty trick for freeing some memory by minimizing the application, Firefox just have no effect with that trick. I don’t know how the developer code Firefox but I think 99% of Windows applications will clear their memory when minimized.
Actually I got a lot more to talk about this matter, but I don’t have enough time currently so, maybe I will continue my humble opinions later.
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