The Great Memory Debate

I’ve been reading Stuart Parmenter’s blog recently, as he seems to be really getting stuck into Firefox 2’s long lamented memory problems. As well as building new tools to analyze the issues, he thinks they that may have identified that the root of all the problems is in part due to memory fragmentation.

There are of course other culprits in the mix, it’s fairly obvious that tabs and extensions can also be greedy when it comes to their share of the memory pie. And to top it off this is all going on wrapped up snugly in Mozilla’s cross browser XUL interface, which can be sluggish at the best of times.

To be honest, I think the fact the beast even runs and does what it can with all these constraints is pretty impressive, but I also know it’s pretty frustrating if it eats all your available memory. I’ve switched to using Kmeleon until the Mozilla crew have worked it out. This is of course a good solution for home browsing, but what about at work?

As Firefox is still a web developers best friend it’s difficult for me to switch to using something else, how do you operate without Firebug? or Chris Pedericks Web Developer Extension?

I guess you could always use (insert browser of choice) and some nifty bookmarklets, like Xray by Westciv. But no… lets not, lets try some third party builds instead.

A generous Japanese tinkerer kindly provides his “special versions” of Firefox and Thunderbird tweaked for many different configurations of system and CPU. His latest Shared Library build is so fast it nearly knocked me clear out of my socks. Be warned though it isn’t 100% stable as yet, it’s an early test version, but will improve.

The new Firefox 3 Beta happily does seem like it’s coming along, and once those fragmentation issues are ironed out it should fly.