Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari And Possibly Opera Affected By Memory Leak

By | May 19, 2011 | 13 Comments

Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari And Possibly Opera, Affected By Memory Leak

According to TNW, Internet Explorer is the only modern web browser (Opera was not tested due to temporary issue with the test page) that is not affected by the recently found memory leak.

One of the developers has created a test site with the Google’s App Engine to demonstrate the issue.

Once the site is back online, users can reproduce the bug by following these steps:

- Request an image from a server.
- Image result contains “Cache-Control: no-store”.
- Display the image.

Instead of freeing allocated memory, none of the tested web browsers did that. Here are his tests results:

Safari 5: Failed
Firefox 4.x: Failed
IE 7/8/9: Passed

As THB said, No-Store attribute was created so browsers would not store image on the local disk. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Furthermore, it looks like the issue is not OS related and was confirmed by both Windows and Linux users.

So here you have it folks, today Microsoft has a good reason to smile about.

[Thanks, RamaSubbu SK!]

Picture Source: Oasiscolonics.com


About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism carrier back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

  • uh-oh

    Looks like Opera 11.11 isn’t affected either.

  • http://profiles.google.com/yaoqq2009 yao qq

    Seems my Avant browser isn’t affected either

  • hh
    • DWBH

       That is nothing, I went to 1.2 + GB. Whatever I do after reaching 1.2 GB closing tab it never go under 300,000 MB … anywayI am ok with this but not all……

  • Eu

    I have IE9 and didn’t passed.  

  • Anonymous

    I can’t access it with Opera 11.11 this comes up http://tinypic.com/r/2ljgton/7

    • http://rudivisser.myopenid.com/ Rudi Visser

       That’s because it’s down, like it says in the post.

    • http://rudivisser.myopenid.com/ Rudi Visser

       That’s because it’s down, like it says in the post.

  • Mikah

     Opera 11.50 alpha is not affected by the memory leak
    http://files.myopera.com/stve10/albums/5142082/memleak.JPG

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Arthur-Titeica/1067443526 Arthur Titeica

    Cache-Control: no-store means “do not store on disk”. Memory management is a totally different thing.

  • Kxp

    Opera 10.10 and 10.50 passed with no memory issues. 

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_RCDZENVSDKLPPWFRKJ6ML4NFJM Armindo

    Obviously this “research” is bullsh!t, and clearly done by someone extremely clueless how browsers work.
    Images are kept in memory decoded, cached for a while so they can be reused, instead of fetching always from network or disk and decode them each time.

  • Black_cj_16

    opera 11.50 alpha works great. no issues

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