I just noticed that Flash now runs as a separate process, at least under Mac OS.

I think that's how they keep FF running in spite of whatever problems flash might cause.

Yeah, out-of-process plugin support is a Firefox 4 feature for OS X. Windows and Linux gained it in 3.6.4. Beyond crash protection, it also allows the browser to move to 64 bit while still supporting 32 bit plugins.

Nope. Still sucking up all the memory it can get its grubby little hands on.

That's why I gave up on Firefox 1.x. I used to love it and now I'm using a browser I used to despise (Safari). Go figure. Between them I ran Camino which was Gecko/Mozilla with a more Mac-like look and sensibility.

Have they acknowledged these types of memory issues?

FF is "fine" for me but it is using up ~380MB at the moment. I've got plenty of RAM so its not a big deal however.

What I have been having issues with is Firefox Sync. My desktop keeps losing the ability to sync or every query the quota information.

I wish mine was using that little:


and it gets bigger than that. I restarted it just a few hours ago and haven't used it a lot since.

I've come to rely on a number of Firefox extensions. I've tried to use Chrome, though not Safari, as I move between OSes and want to have the same browser everywhere, if possible. Chrome wasn't really much better with memory consumption and prevented me from doing a lot of things that I wanted to do that were easy with Firefox and extensions.


Sort of. They've at least improved [url=about:memory]about:memory[/url]. There's also a meta-bug about memory issues.

Up to 480MB now at least by what it says in Task Manager. The about:memory screen shows something else. The quite a bit of the RAM seems to be related to the buffers for the hardware acceleration?

Yeah. I look at the mapcrunch gallery linked in Bitt's bug report link and it makes FF4 go crazy then promptly crash.

Maybe the 64 bit version wouldn't crash and just keep consuming lots of RAM?