The “Break it Down” Blog

Grant Gochnauer sent this gem along, it looks like the Mozilla team is hard at work making Firefox 3 not suck as hard as Firefox 2 did when it came to memory usage. For those that don’t know, the longer you use Firefox, the more memory it leaks. It’s very common to have 1 tab open, then check Task Manager and see Firefox using 800mb of RAM; especially if you use the Google Office applications (Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, etc.), those seem to make Firefox leak memory like a little girl.

Some of the improvements done for Firefox 3 are:

• Decompressed image data is discarded after 5 seconds now (bug)
• Firefox 3 will have an “about:memory” page to show where it’s pissing away ram (bug)
• nsFloatCache was retired (bug)
• XPCOM leaked objects are down to zero now (link)
• A new leaking script has been developed to load tons of popular pages and track which objects are being leaked (bug) (link)
• In debug mode, the cycle collector will now report what was not garbage-collected and why (bug)
• Testing against the top 500 most popular websites and top 20 most popular extensions was done to determine the most common leaks, then the issued fixed.
• David Baron created educational “detecting a leak” screencasts (link)
• JavaScript engine leak was detected when using the watch method, it was fixed and a new utility for detecting these links committed (bug)
• The engine leak detector was modified to jsfunfuzz, which detected some more leaks.