[Discuss] memory leaks in browsers

[tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)]

Dan Ritter wrote:
> - Firefox is a memory hog. (So is Chrome.)

Rich Braun wrote:
> I finally evicted Firefox from my life about 3 years ago over this. I 
> open too many tabs...
> ...it sounds like you'll benefit from taking another look at Chrome...

I typically have both Firefox and Chrome running at any given moment. FF
is my "daily driver" (far superior bookmark management, and better
selection of plug-ins). I use Chrome almost exclusively for Google apps,
like Google Docs. (It also acts as my less restrictive fall-back browser
when a site fails to work in FF.)

Dan is right. They're both horrible memory hogs. But FF has gotten
better compared to what it used to be. And Chrome has gotten worse.
(I've heard this corroborated by others.)

I can have a few dozen tabs in FF open and use about the same RAM as
Chrome with just 3 or so tabs open to Google Docs. Of course much of
that could be attributed to the inefficient design of Google Docs.
Though I've often seen random web pages cause a Chrome process to bloat
to 200+ MB.

There are memory inefficiencies to Chrome's one-process-per-tab approach.

I make heavy use of the task manager in Chrome. I'll restore a session,
and then immediately go to the task manager and kill off the processes
for all tabs but the one I'm actively working with. It preserves most
state nicely, so when you are ready to use a killed tab, you just
reload. (I wish FF had a similar built-in task manager. Understandably
far harder to implement in its single process model. But even if they
exposed the CPU allocation per tab or JS thread and let you halt them,
it would be a help.)

If browsers weren't such memory hogs, I'd love to have dedicated
instances always running for various web based apps...one for G+, one
for the time logging service I use, etc. (Fairly easy to set up
dedicated profiles and icons so they behave like native apps.) But
browsers pretty much start at 50 MB resident use and grow from there,
even for a trivial app.

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
The Perl Shop, Newton, MA, USA
"Predictable On-demand Perl Consulting."
http://www.theperlshop.com/