An explanation about Firefox’s apparently excessive usage of memory in installations of Firefox 1.5 has been posted by one of the project’s lead engineers.
“Guess I’ll make that bug a feature, huh?”
— Jimmy Neutron shows gratitude for Goddard’s explosive “play dead” mode in Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
That Firefox memory leak issue is an effect of the Back-Forward cache employed by the browser, according to Firefox lead engineer Ben Goodger. He posted an overview of the issue some users have encountered.
Excessive memory usage while browsing with Firefox led to complaints of poor browser performance, and even crashes. A tradeoff has been taking place as users open more tabs in Firefox, as Goodger explained:
To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited
The number of pages Firefox will cache per tab depends on the memory in the system. When the Firefox preference
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
is at its default of -1, Goodger noted in a table that systems with 1GB through 4GB of memory will lead Firefox to cache eight pages per tab.
That preference can be set to a value besides -1. A setting of 0 disables caching, but leads to longer page load times, Goodger wrote.
To change the setting, type
about:config
into the Firefox address bar and hit Enter. Navigate to the
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
setting, double-click it, and change it there. Click Ok to accept the new setting.
—
document.write(“Email Murdok here.”)
Drag this 
Add to document.write(“Del.icio.us”) | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
