Memory leak is a ... feature of Firefox

There have been a lot of user reactions over memory leaks in Firefox 1.5 recently, but according to an open-source browser developer, this is . the browser feature.

Ben Goodger, one of Firefox's developers, said users' reactions to Firefox's memory usage have been around for a long time. Mostly in the way Firefox uses memory for temporary storage of web pages, but does not release those storage.

' I think what users are talking about that Firefox is not really a memory leak, but in fact is a feature of Firefox ,' Goodger said.

Goodger explained that the Back-Forward feature in Firefox 1.5 often stores web pages temporarily to allow them to appear immediately after the user clicks the Back or Forward keys. ' This feature may have to store a lot of data that takes up memory, but in return users will get a faster access speed .'

Depending on the amount of memory on the system, Firefox can temporarily store up to 8 different websites. If the system has up to 1GB or more of RAM, Firefox will store 8 websites and if the PC has only 256MB of RAM, only 3 web pages will be temporarily stored.

However, users assume that Firefox does not release the amount of memory used to temporarily store that site even when the browser is closed. This results in the system becoming sluggish if you open at the same time multiple tabs of different websites in Firefox.

' Firefox should free up the memory it has used, ' said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's technical director - yesterday. ' However, in the browser, there are many different types of caches that make the release work a rather complicated issue. Therefore, in those cases that cannot be released, we have to admit it is a memory leak '.

But Goodger still thinks that every version of Firefox has no memory leaks, it's just a common problem in complex software.

Users can fully configure the Back-Forward cache feature by reducing the amount of memory available for this feature. Open Firefox browser and enter the "about: config" command (without the '' sign) in the address bar to access the configuration file. Go to the " browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers " command line and double-click on it. If you enter the value ' 0 ' - the feature will be disabled. Values ​​from 1 - 8 allow the feature to store the corresponding number of websites and ' -1 ' returns to the default.