Just noting that I closed my ‘gmail’ window, and my Firefox process went from 883M to 585M.
I guarantee that 300M weren’t being used by the gmail page as it stood. Perhaps Google’s Javascript foo is not as powerful as they’d like, and it’s holding onto old AJAX results?

I can guess a few other things about what might be going wrong (caching AJAX requests in the browser, for instance), but one way or another, if you have memory problems with Firefox 2 and you keep a gmail tab open, try closing your gmail tab now and then.

I have to wonder if it’s a general AJAXy problem with Firefox, or specific to gmail…

One way to test (which I’m going to try soon) is to try a ‘reload page’ instead of a ‘close tab’, to see if it’s the browser/page-renderer/caching keeping the memory occupied, or the JavaScript on the page that is abusing memory.

There are limits to how much CPU we allow any given page of JavaScript to have; I’m surprised there aren’t any limits to how much memory it can have.

– Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

I used to do this with ‘new windows’ in Netscape 4.x, and I got into a long discussion with a Netscape engineer about my usage patterns (having 40+ Netscape windows open tended to crash it badly eventually), and they acknowledged that the program was unstable under that kind of usage. Worse, was that the email reader ran in the same process as the browser, so crashing the browser crashed my mail. Tabs (and Firefox, as a lighter browser) saved my sanity.

I try to never close my browser, and I reboot my computer only every couple of weeks (and that’s only if it’s my Windows box). Happily with Session Saver, I never had to worry about shutting down my browser, as it preserves my tabs and windows. (I miss Session Saver in Safari…)

If you find that Firefox 1.5 is unstable under too many tabs (it worked pretty well for me), get a session saver. It’s a life-saver when your browser crashes and you would otherwise lose 100+ tabs that you clicked to look at later, so you don’t know what the URLs were…

Firefox 2 ships with (x) on each tab. Bleh. Fix it by browsing to:
about:config
Filter for:
browser.tabs.closeButtons
double-click it, and set the value to:
3
You can create it if it doesn’t already exist.)
I recommend the FF2 extension ‘Restarter’, until they add the Restart option into the menu standard, in order to deal better with adding extensions. For the IE7-ish ‘preview’ mode, I’d suggest the extension Showcase, or Reveal if they update that plugin to 2.0.

I’d also suggest turning on session saving for all sessions, by adding configs:
browser.startup.page=3
browser.sessionstore.resume_session=true
Now if only I could revert to the old ‘shrinking tab’ behavior, at least down to a certain width.

Update: You can set this by changing your config options as follows:

browser.tabs.tabClipWidth=35
browser.tabs.tabMinWidth=25
This will set your tab width to 25 pixels minimum, which will let you see a LOT more tabs than the old setting of 100. I chose 35 for the clip width, based on having divided the minWidth by 4, I divided the clipWidth (default of 140) by 4 as well. However, my tab usage often means that I need nothing more than the favicon in the tab to know where I’m going, or I never random-access the tabs, closing one to continue reading at another page.

Anyhow, these have been some power user tips from a dedicated Firefox user.

– Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!