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Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

The about:memory feature is useful to get a glimpse into what extensions and tabs are chewing up the most memory, although I haven't had much luck in FF 14 using the GC/CC to correct that. I hope that FF 15 gives the user a bit more intuitive view and control over the memory consumption on tabs and addons/extensions.

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Sure, for technical users that might be a nice value add. In fairness though, a regular person shouldn't have to care--Firefox should just work, stay responsive, etc.

In fairness though, a regular person shouldn't have to care--Firefox should just work, stay responsive, etc.

In fact, that isn't fair. Software has never been like that, and it's irresponsible to represent to non-technical users that it's possible.

about:memory is primarily intended as a debugging tool, so we can diagnose and fix memory problems. It has been a fantastic success in this regard.

It also gives add-on authors and web application developers a chance to do the same.

If some (advanced/heavy) users are also able to use about:memory to diagnose and work around problems they encounter, that's a nice side effect. As long as some of those users remember to file bug reports, that is :)

FF15 gives a lot more details about memory consumption, because "compartments" (the way the JS heap is segregated) are a lot more fine-grained. In particular, compartments created by add-ons can now be identified. But note that this only covers some add-on memory consumption; the remainder is not reported separately, and doing so is difficult.

about:memory is quite intimidating, I'm hoping to implement soon a vastly simpler version that will give a simple per-tab breakdown and be understandable by normal users.

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