My Firefox has been on the acting up lately, freezing for a couple of minutes before suddenly springing back to life. I suspected it was gobbling up memory, so I checked:
519 MB of RAM? Alright, I haven't closed it for nearly 10 days now and I sometimes have over 25 tabs in it, but when I took this screenshot there were only 5 tabs open, and none had Flash, Java etc. on them. If Windows can handle running for nearly 10 days without a reboot (I hibernate my laptop), surely Firefox should be able to. It's not the first time I've had this problem - I've had it since at least Firefox 1.5 - and I'm clearly not the only one, as shown
here. And it's definitely not a lack of memory on my laptop - it's got 1.5GB of RAM in it.
You're probably asking why I just don't restart Firefox, and the reason is because some of the tabs I have open are for password-protected websites, so when I restart Firefox, I'll have to log into all of them again (still have to even if I tell Firefox to reopen my tabs).
The other issue I have with Firefox is it's form data saving feature. Because it saves form data without asking, I was paying some bills the other day and I realised it had saved all my credit card details, among other things! My guess is that it isn't encrypted either. I don't want to turn it off though because it's helpful sometimes, especially for commenting on blogs so I don't have to enter my details all the time. There should be an exception list for sites you don't want the info saved, and a screen for you to delete data from - similar to the Cookie manager in Firefox.
Maybe this will get fixed in Firefox 3.0
I might give IE7 a go and see if it's better.
UPDATE (29/05/2007): I have a new record!
600MB for Firefox is absolutely ridiculous. And it wasn't even that big a session, as far as I can remember. I mean I have no problem if Firefox uses heaps of memory when I have a whole heap of tabs open, but now I only have 6 tabs open, no Flash or Java on any of them. The problem is that Firefox doesn't release the memory after it's not needed anymore. As for installing more memory? I have plenty of memory, the problem is when an app needs that much memory, it becomes sloooow...it takes 10 seconds to open a blank tab.