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osxrules · Nov 20, 2004, 11:31 AM

I knew it was a little bloated but that's ridiculous. I use Maya 6 and it does similar but Firefox is just a web browser.

When I say 500MB Ram btw, I mean 50MB actual Ram and about 450MB virtual memory. Not sure if you add them but still, Safari only uses 50MB real and 150-250MB virtual.

I don't like Safari though because I can't save web pages with images, I can't get addons to put in the contextual menu to do things like dictionary searches on my selected word or other stuff (even if you could put applescripts in the contextual menu) and it doesn't store/fill passwords as well as firefox.

Does anyone know of a way to streamline firefox by maybe removing some default components or by setting some preferences? Does it have a memory leak maybe?

lavar78 · Nov 20, 2004, 11:43 AM

Originally posted by osxrules:
I can't get addons to put in the contextual menu to do things like dictionary searches on my selected word or other stuff

Well, this seems pretty close. Alternatively, you could download the free OmniDictionary.

osxrules · Nov 21, 2004, 03:07 PM

Thanks for that. It's only one of a few things I need better in Safari though. Ultimately, I think a less bloated Firefox is what I need or maybe more Ram.

lavar78 · Nov 21, 2004, 04:13 PM

You're welcome. Anything else specifically? I'm not sure what you mean about saving passwords -- Safari seems to work just as well to me.

monkeybrain · Nov 21, 2004, 05:23 PM

I'm wondering over what time period you made your tests. I mean if Firefox was left open for a long time wouldn't it use more virtual memory as it put more stuff it had used in there? Does that make sense, or am I being simplistic? So perhaps try Safari over the same length of time and with the same pages (a benchmark tool is what we need, is there one?)

I can imagine Firefox uses more though. I tried it, was impressed but found it slowed with time. Thus I went back to my trusty Camino (which is currently using 500mb of virtual ram for me, but I have had it open about 2 days).

yukon · Nov 21, 2004, 08:20 PM

It does use a lot of memory. Everyone thought it was a huge memory leak, supposedly it's just caching a whole lot in RAM. It's really a speedy and memory efficient browser on Windows, but that's because it's not just a "whoa, it compiles for you guys too" thing. The plan was to update it for mac specific problems just after 1.0 for the other platforms, now it's to release 1.1 around march (last I checked) to fix both it's issues on the Macintosh and some appearance problems in GNOME (hey, it's what the roadmap said, I use blackbox). Search google for "firefox roadmap", it's difficult to find on their homepage.

Twister · Nov 22, 2004, 10:15 AM

I've wondered about this issue too. Here are my conclusions. On some machines, not all, Firefox's memory usage just goes up and up over time. If you quit the browser and re-open it, it clears out. Is there a fix? Nope, just restarting FF every now and then does the trick. Is it a real problem? I don't know. I've never proved anything. Just theorys and I don't seem to have the same problem on another Mac. Maybe it has to do with an extension? Who knows.

yukon · Nov 22, 2004, 11:17 PM

Sorry to make a short non-insightful post that also slightly derails a thread, but what about the extensions? Does anyone know the problems a buggy extension can cause? I did have TabBrowser Extensions stop Firefox from running a while back, but is there any reason not to use as many extensions as possible if they still at least seem to work? I dunno if this is a "A Script that Firefox Runs", or "A Program that Patches Firefox", what problems a poor extensions can cause....