FF leaks memory, but it's a "feature"

[PUTALE]

this is rather interesting news. Apparently, FF does has problem on it's own. According to the news posted by theinquire, FF 1.5 leaks memory. HOwever, the engineer of FF claims that this leak is actually a feature in the FF. Mmh, I wonder how this will plays out...


THE BIG cheese engineer behind the Mozzarella Foundation’s Firefox has hit out at those who claim that the browser has problems with leaky memory.
Writing in his bog, the lead engineer for Firefox, Ben Goodger, said that while it was true that Firebadger did leak a bit, it was a common problem in software this complicated.

He said that most of the people who moaned about memory leakage on Fireferret 1.5 failed to realise that what they were complaining about was actually a ‘feature’ of the software. Goodger said that to improve performance when navigating Firefox 1.5 uses a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last few session history entries.

He said that this can mean that Firefox can end up storing a lot of data, but it did give the browser faster navigation speeds.

Firebadger has a preference browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers file which by default is set to -1. This will mean that by default you will save eight pages of information. If you want to save memory you can set it to 0 but your page load performance will suffer, he said.

Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29707

[pym]

I thought that 1.5.0.1 clained to solve the memory leaks issues
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=577

At any case, that's a funny "Feature", but then, maybe they should add a check box to the options menu "Consume more memory than needed" :lol:

Maybe we'll see another patch for the FF soon enough, ha?

[liqnit]

FF alpha 2.0 is coing in this days.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Firefox_20_Alpha_MacTel_Version_Soon/1137435894

maybe there will be some major changes

[pym]

I sure hope there will be some changes and we'll get a final version that we won't have to patch too often...

[liqnit]

one of the main problem of debugging a software is that always there is soome who will find a bug
and until evryuser test it at his PC you cannot be sure that you covered each and evry angle
it great getting a bugless Software\game but i think it will take such a long beta period that it will finally go out it will be outdated.
fast progress creates problems

[BlackStar]

I sure hope there will be some changes and we'll get a final version that we won't have to patch too often...

Like Windows XP? :P

I should add that I don't have too big a problem with companies releasing patches - at least they're fixing problems. Unfortunately, no programmer or company can find all the problems that exist with a piece of software. Testing software to 100% would be nearly impossible and quite expensive.

With that said, this "feature" seems a bit obvious.

[PUTALE]

yeah. I like the fact that companies are fixing stuff, though they should test it more extensively before putting it in the markets(we can't complain too much as FF is free, but program such as Windows, Office, should be extensively tested before releasing. It seems liek it's always like till the sp2 or more when these big programs are stable.

One thing to notice is that PC is composed of a lot of components, so we all have diff components, drivers, softwares and such, so sometimes it's really hard to fix everything as we all have so complicated system.

[Null]

Feature without benefit is like...

Yin without yang.

[pym]

it great getting a bugless Software\game

No such thing as bugless software.
Every software has bugs, you just don't find them or not looking for them.

[liqnit]

this was i was talking about - but still you can try to minimize the critical bugs
and let out software with minor ones.

[BlackStar]

That's the really frustrating part - when companies release a software product that doesn't work without the patch that also has just been released. Why bother? Just for marketing to say "we made our commit date."

Yeah, little annoying bugs will only appear when lots of users try all the different features, and sometimes a "feature" becomes a bug only when enough people say "I don't want it to do that."

"Fireferret" - HA!