Mozilla Gets Serious About Firefox Memory Leaks

By | November 17, 2011 | 7 Comments

Mozilla Gets Serious About Firefox Memory Leaks

Blames add-ons for the majority of its problems.

Continuing its efforts to reduce Firefox memory leaks, Mozilla’s Justin Lebar has proposed a new approach, which should eliminate at least some of the issues with various add-ons.

Here is how it would work:

- Mozilla will ask developers to check their extensions for zombie compartments that cause a lot of memory leaks.
- If any found, they should be fixed.
- If developer chooses to ignore memory leaks, users will be informed about known memory or performance bugs before add-on installation.

Minus better bug tracking, that’s pretty much it.

Will it help? Well, according to Justin, “the vast majority of bugs which take the form of “OMG Firefox is using 8 zettabytes of RAM” are not due to problems in Firefox. Instead, most major memory bugs are due to problems in Firefox add-ons.”

If this is actually true and such approach becomes reality, Mozilla might finally be able to patch its Achilles’ heel.


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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.

  • Tiago Sá

    This won’t fix anything, it’ll just give them a widespread excuse. It’s a fair and just excuse, I should say, but it won’t fix anything.

    But then again, the wild outlandish requests of a “task manager” or every add-on being restartless are impossible to come true in the next couple of years, since they require a complete rewrite of a fundamental aspect of the platform, if not a complete rethink of its most fundamental aspect: extensibility.

    I don’t think Firefox will ever have every add-on being restartless. The majority? Sure, why not, but not every one. And the of course add-ons that are not restartless will be extremely hard to implement with the task manager…

  • sedkfndsk

    they should really do that, it made me switch back to chrome right now, i will wait for a much more polished version of firefox, hopefully somewhere around 11 or 12, which is almost revamped, agian, hopefully

  • Max Renn

    How can it be the add-ons? I don’t have any installed and Firefox ate over 600 MB in one recent session.

  • Mikah

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
    Maybe they should add another category Tested & Stable.

  • Asknobody

    Thats why when features are installed in browsers core is better solution then third party extensions. You don’t have to beg developers to fix memory problems, but company can do it itself..

  • http://my.opera.com/TiRaNiD/about/ TiRANiD

    Ok, Firefox has its issues, but it never gave me a memory leak like I had in Opera once.
    The screen – http://files.myopera.com/TiRaNiD/files/OperaMemory.jpg
    Take a look, you’ll be surprised.

    • Mikah

      I’ve been using FF Nightly for several months & its been pretty good with memory although I don’t have any extensions or do any heavy browsing with it easily  uses the least memory compared with Opera, Chrome & IE.

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