Browser Security News

Even after at least hundreds of posts on digg.com, even after a Slashdot article there’s thousands of people out there complaining about the Firefox Memory Bug. Lets get it straight. It’s not a bug. It’s part of the cache feature. This ‘feature’ is how the pages are cached in a tabbed environment. To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited less than 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last five session history entries for each tab. This is a lot of data. If you have a lot of tabs, Firefox’s memory usage can climb dramatically. It’s a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web.

Now alot of us have found the secrets on how to manipulate settings in “about:config” to drop the memory usage as long as possible and to increase the speed at which Firefox loads sites. Firefox does not have a memory “bug”, but here’s how you improve mem usage « element14