I am getting increasingly aggravated at Firefox’s lack of adequate garbage collection. Firefox, over the typical span of usage over several days, or weeks, in which multiple tabs are opened and closed, possibly hundreds of sites visited, cumulatively thousands of JavaScript functions executed, and Flash instances instantiated, begins to consume inordinate amounts of memory. I have seen my Firefox process consume well in excess of a gigabyte, for example, though I’m only looking at 2 or 3 sites simultaneously. When I visit the Firefox IRC channel and inquire about this, as so many have before me, the excuse is given that the poor code written within websites or many memory leaks that plugins like flash and quicktime have are the culprit and are completely outside the responsibility of Firefox and its developers. I don’t buy it. Firefox, by proxy, is the new operating system in today’s world of Internet delivered applications. Thus it is Firefox’s responsibility, in my opinion, to perform aggressive garbage collection and manage memory leaked by wayward processes spawned from within it. In my typical session, where I have two gmail accounts open, and a couple of other tabs open simultaneously, I have to restart Firefox or kill it forcefully every few days it seems. As a Linux user who typically experiences login sessions measured in weeks to months of uninterrupted uptime, this is simply unacceptable. Supposedly version 3, which is currently in beta, addresses these many issues. We will see. I’m sure some of the garbage collection features and fixed memory leaks will undoubtedly help. However I feel the pathology of, “it’s not our problem” is the wrong attitude to take by Firefox developers. They need to step up to the plate as the developers of the Internet operating system of the future and do everything possible to deliver the best user experience possible.

Let’s watch and see what happens.