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Comment by pmarsh | Hacker News Reader

One of the issues I've seen people complain about is having to close Firefox after a few days. I understand you shouldn't HAVE to close a program, but how are people using their browsers that this becomes such an huge problem?

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I don't reboot my desktop for months at a time. Current uptime is 25 days... 25 days ago I moved offices. X stays up. Firefox and Chrome and most of the other applications I use regularly stay up. Why should this be exceptional?

What's faster than an SSD for loading an application? Switching to the already open window.

While this is basically true (and even more so for me, typically 3+ months before a security update finally nags me into rebooting 1 month after it was installed) Firefox saves your open tabs, so restarting takes no time and it is basically like it didn't even happen.

You're right (although re-starting firefox isn't quite an instant thing), but like dsr_, I don't turn my computer off - so why would I ever restart a program unless I need to? Killing firefox and restoring the session might not take a long time, but it's always going to take longer than not having to restart it.

I hibernate my windows PC indefinitely (about 2 months so far). Till firefox 11 or so I had to close it every 3 days or so with 4-5 hours of heavy browsing each day. With latest versions I go for about 8 days without close. More importantly, firefox used to slow down noticeably in between browsing before but now it remains snappy till it starts hitting the disk for paged memory. With this memory leak fixing, I hope to go longer without closing firefox.

What's the purpose of leaving the browser open for several days?

That's exactly my question. Read through the comments here and just elsewhere when it comes to Firefox memory usage and there's usually enough people complaining about how after leaving it open days on end with 20 tabs it uses a ton of RAM.

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