Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Also having the lowest memory consumption is not always the best indicator for how good a browser is. For example, I think Chrome uses more memory per tab than most other browsers, because of its individual sandboxing system. But that seems to be a pretty fair trade-off. Has Firefox started using sandboxing yet?

View on HN

Maybe you're right about lowest memory consumption, but what keeps me going back to Chrome is consistency in good performance and the fact that I can easily shut down one tab without having to restart the whole browser to reduce memory if that ever happens.

All browsers do have memory leaks but the fact that FF's memory continually increases to the point where I have to restart the whole browser every day is mentally tiring. This is where Chrome just got it right.

FF's memory continually increases to the point where I have to restart the whole browser every day

That’s really not the case any more.

This was fixed for extension-free firefox. Today this is fixed, for extensions as well.

What was happening was that extensions had references to dom-nodes of a page, that prevented the page from being unloaded when you close the tab. Unless of course, the extendion author bothered to fix this from their side. Now, an extension has essentially "weak references" to dom nodes. (think: symlink)

I second this. On Ubuntu 12.04 Unity crashes after approximately 20 days of uptime and that's Almost the only time I restart Firefox. I regularly have a single session open for weeks.

That’s really not the case any more.

So far in my testing and browsing, it is.

Just to update, after a couple of hours playing with it, I am finally noticing it fluxuates up and down. It appears to let go of consumed memory after a period of inactivity. That's great news!

Glad to hear it! But as implied above, memory consumption is only interesting because of its effects on performance and stability (both of the browser and other programs running on the system). Don't choose your browser by looking at the memory consumption, choose your browser based on how it feels when you use it.

Firefox only sandbox plugins like Flash, but they have plans for more sandboxing. No idea what the status is though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com