Firefox admits memory problem

 

Gallery

By Barry Collins

Posted on 12 Nov 2007 at 08:32

A leading member of the Mozilla board says that the Firefox team is working hard to plug the memory leaks that have afflicted the open-source browser.

Firefox frequently draws criticism for its alleged memory leakage, with the browser consuming more and more of a PC's system resources the longer it remains open.

The Firefox team has long denied that there's any significant memory leakage in the browser, but now a Mozilla board member claims addressing the issue has become a high priority, as Mozilla looks to take the browser on to mobile devices.

"For a long time, there have been a lot of complaints about the memory usage in Firefox and anything else that used the Gecko engine. And looking at the numbers for what Firefox would use for memory, they seemed valid," Blizzard writes on his blog.

"As Mozilla starts down the path to running in the mobile space we are spending time looking at memory pressure issues more closely."

Blizzard claims new tests have shown the problem doesn't lie in leaks, as such, but the way in which memory is fragmented by the browser. Illustrations on developer Stuart Parmenter's site show how the browser is stealing more memory than it actually needs.

Solving the issue could prove critical to Firefox's chances of success in the mobile market. Whilst memory hogging is an annoyance on PCs, it could prove catastrophic on limited-memory mobile devices, especially if it prevents the handset making or receiving calls. "Over the next few months it will be very interesting to see what happens with both memory usage and perceived performance especially as we connect those numbers to a successful mobile strategy," says Blizzard.