I have used the Firefox 3 beta on a couple of test machines, and it seemed fast and reasonably lightweight. So I was surprised to see this post from NeoSmart today. After a snippet from a Mozilla paper touting big improvements in memory usage and a concerted effort to stomp out memory leaks, the author (there’s no by-line on the post) notes:
Firefox still uses a lot of memory – way too much memory for a web browser.
We haven’t seen it reach 1GiB+ like we have with previous versions, but it’s quite normal for Firefox 3 to be sucking up ~300MiB of memory right off the bat, without a memory leak (the difference between memory leaks and normal memory abusage is that in a memory leak you’ll see the memory usage keep increasing the longer the browser is open/in-use).
I’ll take a closer look later, but meanwhile I throw it out to you. The final release is just around the corner. Who’s been using Firefox 3? Are you happy with it? Does it demand a lot of your system resources?
Firefox doesn’t use as much memory as it predecessor, and uses a similar amount in comparison to other browsers (i.e., Safari, Opera, IE, ect). However, there is a VERY small tool called the, Firefox Ultimate Optimizer, and instantly reduces FF memory usage. I am currently using it, and FF is running on 276k w/o delay. This tool has been tested by such antivirus kings such as, Kaspersky and Trend Micro, and has been found to be clean. If you’re an FF you’ll love it; it can be download at http://firefox-ultimate-optimizer.en.softonic.com/
Those guys at neosmart are looking for some web traffic & need some ass whipping..so do you ed!
Chris, I asked a question of the community here and got some great input. What’s your point?
It’s NOT a memory hog. Period. It uses very little ram on my aging PC. Memory usage is usually b/w 50 & 100 MB’s..I’ve never seen it go above & i usually have at least 7 tabs open on an average.
I’ve had a wonderful experience with FF 3 in my Ubuntu installation. I’ve done a couple of tests and have found that FF seems to operate faster, and use less memory in Linux compared to Windows
Now that I’ve located beta versions of extensions I like to use (TabMixPlus, FireFTP, Firebug) I’m very happy with Firefox 3. Been using it three weeks/ nine hours a day. The more I use it the more I notice small improvements. No crashes and no memory issues.
The most problematic application I use regularly is Internet Explorer (IE8 beta).
I use Firefox with multiple user profiles which I start or stop several times a day (profiles for casual browsing, research, another for development, et cetera) I have a Windows XP computer with 512 MB of RAM. The CPU is Athlon XP clocking at 1.47 GHz.
I rarely have memory issues to speak of. I’m reasonably careful to avoid overtaxing the computer. I don’t use heavy IDE’s or wrangle huge photos. If I have any issues whatsoever (which is rare) they’re related to CPU usage or wireless network hassles.
I do web development and programming all the time. Granted, I don’t use virtualization, heavy-duty image processing, and DVD pirat..err, encoding. Gaming is out of the question.
I could have mentioned the following:
A couple of web sites which are flash-heavy can prevent Firefox from responding momentarily while the page is loading (or perhaps being processed). This has recently started to annoy me on sites like Tom’s guide or Anandtech.
I used to block flash long ago, but I stopped as it didn’t seem worth the trouble once I got DSL. A dual-core proc and more memory would likely erase these problems, I suspect. The same problem affects Fx 2.
I doubt this is a Firefox issue per se. It never crashes Firefox unless I get impatient and try to close the window or use task manager to interrupt it.
“…on our Windows PCs, it’s normal to find Firefox 3 taking up ~350MiB”
I have ten tabs open to popular web sites. Mine is using 110 MB. I don’t know where they get these numbers. I’ve never been able to duplicate the complainer’s memory usage stats in the past. I wonder what nutty extensions they might be using?
Could it be related to huge numbers of RSS feeds? That’s something I just don’t use much.
FF3 is not a memory hog. Memory usage is usually between 50-80 MB’s.
I have never seen it go above and i usually have at least 3 tabs open on an average.
Furthermore, FF3 rocks …. it’s so fast!!!!!!
I’ve seen ‘Firefox is a memory hog- it uses 300MB’ stories regularly over the last few years. OK, using 300MB out of 512MB RAM could probably be called ‘hogging’, but what about using 300MB out of 1GB- isn’t 30% just, well, ‘use’. And the blog author in question here used machines ‘ranging from 2GB to 8GB of memory’. 300MB out of 2G is 15% and out of 8G less than 4%. When does 300MB stop being hoggish and become piffling?
(Currently FF3b5 ~100MB/1G.)
Ed, I have been using the FF3 betas for a while now, and while in general I like it and it uses much less memory, I have a few issues I’d like to resolve:
1) The embedded pop-up blocker resets to “off” every time I start it. I must have a setting wrong somewhere.
2) Continental.com will frequently not let me login. I find I have to switch over to IE7 when that happens.
3) Most of my add-ins have not been migrated over yet. I suspect the official release will hurry up that process.
4) My most annoying issue is something which may cause me to avoid switching on my primary machine. I scan a lot of sites daily. While I ultimately may switch over to an RSS reader for that, today I mainly accomplish this by opening up an entire folder of bookmarks in one go. When I’m done, I open the next folder, which (in FF2) overwrites the current folders (which is what I want to have happen). Apparently, the consensus on the Mozilla development team is that this is a destructive condition, and they have eliminated this option in FF3. I am an advanced user, so I don’t care if this option is an advanced setting, but as of FF3 RC2, they are still refusing to allow this as an option. There are some add-ins that attempt to resolve this issue, but I’d rather it be a native option. Opening ten tabs, and then ten more (and having 20 and not 10 at that point) is extremely annoying to me. A discussion of this problem can be found here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=395024
Clearly, I’m in the minority, but there are a lot of people that feel strongly negative about this change, especially because they are not even allowing it as an advanced setting.
@Stephan: I for one will welcome the change where opening a bookmark folder will not overwrite current tabs. I would use the feature more often if that is the case. I currently have a “startup” folder that I check right away. If I ever want to check it later, I open a new *window* and then open the folder. I really like the tabs, and only want to see one window ever. However, given that there are people (or at least one) who like the old behavior, it seems reasonable to me (without reading any of the issues surrounding it) to have a hidden about:config option to get the old behavior back.
I ran into a bug with SSL not working on any reasonably new apache2 servers configured with the defaults, so I uninstalled, and haven’t tried again. FF2 is working perfectly fine for me, so I don’t have a reason to upgrade. I also haven’t any issues with memory like other folks that I have heard of. My machines are typically 512MB, linux and windows. I don’t have lots of tabs open usually, though when browsing phpbb3 sites, I typically open up every issue that I am going to read, so might have 30 tabs open. I don’t see any issues then either. I suspect it is javascript/flash/etc related, and since I run a webwasher proxy filter, I don’t see most of that stuff.
I’m using FF3.0 RC2. I’ve got 20+ tabs open in one window. The browser has been up all day. Memory usage according Sysinternals Process Explorer: Virtual Size 434,000K Working Set 282,000K.
Better than any other browser I’ve used.
Cheers
Mark
sadly firefox 3 still does have huge memory hog
for me its 75Mb after 5 mins..even trim doesnt helping
yes firefaux is the new ie. try maxthon and you will see that with many option, many features, secure browsing you still don’t need more than 100mb, cpu usage of not more than 5% at any time and be fast too.
it is just ridiculous how much ram firefaux uses if you leave it on especially using something related to java….190mb?…15% cpu usage? come on now. and when i try to save images or favorite site it stops a second or 2 and then starts. thats just bs.
people have fallen for the marketing PR campaign of “best browser”…it was in 2004, not now anymore. that is maxthon, try it.
This thread is a little old, I found it by searching for Firefox memory issues. I DO have an occasional problem, let me describe. First off, FF 3.0.1 (but I’ve seen it on previous 3x’s), Win XP SP3, monoprocessor, a gig of memory.
Hardly any add-ons, just stuff like Google toolbar.
Normally with about 3 tabs open, it cruises along at 100-200 or so MB. But occasionally the whole machine slows to a crawl, and I catch FF steadily consuming more and more memory, upwards of 600 MB, even without doing ANY interaction with the web pages open (although they are things like Yahoo Finance, which updates constantly).
Suddenly the usage drops back to the more normal 100-200 MB, then proceeds with the same increase pattern, the memory graph looks just like a sawtooth plot.
If I catch it doing that, I’ll close it out (and that sometimes takes MINUTES because the system is so bogged down), and after restarting it’ll behave for a while.
I haven’t run across a description quite like this; of course, I need to do more testing to see what happens when closing certain tabs, sites, etc, but usually by that time I’m so frustrated I just want to get it working again so *I* can get working.
I downloaded and installed a Windows XP update that fixes a GDI memory leak:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9b5edfc8-a4bb-4080-9063-6518166e2dab&displayLang=en
and after that, FF3 memory has been very stable. I’ve been running this about 3 or 4 days now, and FF3 memory use is OK. So maybe that will fix the problem. I would like to hear feedback from others.