The longer you run Firefox during a computing session, the more memory it consumes. Its developers have said this is a feature, making the browser faster when switching between tabs or paging back and forth. But over time, it bogs Firefox down, and it eventually becomes painfully slow. The only fix is to close the browser and restart it.
I don't know whether Firefox 3.0 has completely fixed this issue — its developers say more than 350 memory leaks have been plugged — but I do know that the new browser uses a lot less memory.
I launched the Windows version of Firefox 2.0, opened two tabs and checked the Task Manager to see that it was using more than 48 megabytes of memory. I let it sit for three hours and discovered that number had jumped to 75 MB!
I did the same test with Firefox 3.0 beta 3, and it started out with 34 MB. After three hours, it had only increased to 38 MB. Much better.
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It also starts up and displays pages faster than version 2.0.
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