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Quote:Firefox 1.5 has been out since November 29, 2005, and has garnered glowing reviews around the Internet. This is not one of them. In fact, I recommend holding off, at least temporarily, on installing Firefox 1.5. I've installed and used Firefox 1.5 through the betas, and had no trouble, but somewhere early in the Release Candidates I began to encounter problems. And I'm beginning to learn that I might not be alone in that. I can't speak with authority that a large number of Firefox users are having issues with Firefox 1.5; I am, though, hearing sufficient reports about trouble to be cautious.

The issues people are reporting to me are highly varied. Some of the more dramatic problems have included damaged Firefox profiles and loss of right-button context menus, but the more common issues by far have to do with CPU and/or memory usage.

Quote:Firefox 1.5, as it turns out, still eats up system memory the way my dog eats his dinner: No matter how much he gets, it goes fast and it's never enough. I got a vivid reminder of this two nights ago, when I gawked in amazement as Firefox tore through more than 400MB of physical RAM and virtual memory on a Windows XP system.

That's 400MB apiece, and that number continued to climb even after I took the Windows Task Manager screen shot you'll find in Scot Finnie's feature detailing this and other serious problems with Firefox 1.5. I finally killed this voracious little pig after it had gobbled nearly 500 MB of RAM -- half of the total memory on this system -- and another 500MB of virtual memory, brought a cutting-edge system I had built just a few months ago to its knees, and then finally quit responding.

Quote:Firefox 1.5, as it turns out, still eats up system memory the way my dog eats his dinner:

Quote:A lot of people complain about the Firefox "memory leak(s)". All versions of Firefox no doubt leak memory - it is a common problem with software this complicated. We look to fix the issues where we can. David Baron and others have done a huge amount of excellent work in this area.

What I think many people are talking about however with Firefox 1.5 is not really a memory leak at all. It is in fact a feature.

To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited < 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last few session history entries. This can be a lot of data. It's a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web.

For those who remain concerned, here's how the feature works....