Nov 18

CyberNotes: Firefox 2.0 Memory Leaks

Posted in: CyberNotes, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on July 12, 2006 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Web Browser Wednesday
 

Firefox is a great browser and with version 2.0 due in August many people are expecting great things. However, it seems like it doesn’t even matter to people whether Mozilla puts any new features in they just want to see the memory leaks disappear.

Mozilla has not ignored the demand for fixed memory leaks and that is why Firefox 2.0 will have 13 memory leaks fixed! Below is a list of memory leaks that Mozilla has posted that are unique only to the Firefox 2.0 build.

  • Bug 168411 – Move bookmarks transactions into a JS service (adding a bookmark leaks the Add Bookmark dialog)
  • Bug 206520 – XMLHttpRequest leaks memory if send() not called and event listeners set
  • Bug 289689 – Memory leak: nsDebugImpl::Assertion, Create Process
  • Bug 319980 – javascript garbage collector not run when supposed to, leading to “memory leak”
  • Bug 323454 – [FIX]Don’t leak the channel and XMLHttpRequest object if AsyncOpen fails
  • Bug 325984 – DOMWindow leak with <col onload> (will be implemented into Firefox 1.5.0.5)
  • Bug 330780 – [ATK only] global nsAppRootAccessible is not released on shutdown
  • Bug 330878 – Firefox leaks the update.xml document when it checks for updates
  • Bug 333764 – Livemark Service leaking nsRDFResource and RDFServiceImpl references
  • Bug 334105 – [FIX]ASSERTION: Bogus: ‘!mHead’ (nsLineBox.cpp#916 – nsFloatCacheFreeList::Append)
  • Bug 336922 – nsAnnotationService leaks
  • Bug 337044 – Search engine Manager leaks an observer when canceled
  • Bug 341301 – 1.8 branch firefox leaks like a sieve

I know that you probably don’t understand what some of those mean, heck, I don’t even know what some of those mean. I am just trying to show you that the upgrade to Firefox 2 will definitely be worth it. However, Mozilla will not be able to incorporate fixes for all of the memory leaks in version 2.0. Currently Firefox 3.0 has nearly double the number of memory leak fixes which may mean there is a promising future ahead. In the mean time I had found this to help my Firefox memory leak. I have had 104,000+ visitors to my site that came just to view that article.

I hope you now realize that Mozilla is working on the memory leaks but they are very hard to pinpoint. I have been running Firefox 2.0 nightly builds for months now and the memory leaks are very minimal for me. I currently only have 5 extensions running because sometimes they end up being the culprit that makes Firefox eat up 300MB of memory. Every now and then you just can’t get around it and have to restart the browser.

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