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Please correct me if I am wrong, but shouldn't developers only worry about the issues mentioned in the article on older browsers? (I'm thinking IE6 and earlier).

Introducing a leak via circular references would be considered a bug in most modern JS engines, right?

A related question: Can someone recommend a good plugin/extension for monitoring the size of a page's javascript memory usage over time?

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I think developers should always try to avoid poor programming practices instead of relying on implementation details of the browser.

Poor programming practices? The code that creates circular references is clearer than the example workarounds. Sacrificing clarity to avoid a problem that doesn't occur in supported browsers doesn't make much sense.

Failing to call "delete" on a pointer you "new"'ed in C++ is also clearer, and just as incorrect. The ECMAScript spec makes no mention of how memory will be managed for the user. Right or wrong in terms of clarity, it's still a poor practice to assume the browser will behave in a particular way that's not covered by the specification (regardless of how sensible that behavior might be!).

Chrome's Web Inspector lets you take heap snapshots at different times. It won't give you a graph of memory usage, but it will let you monitor it at different times

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