[citation][nom]mitch074[/nom]@blazorthon: Firefox doesn't _need_ much memory to run - it just makes use of as much RAM as it can to improve speed: - a great deal of the cache is in RAM - this allowed Mozilla to implement a real Private Browsing mode. - images are kept unpacked as long as RAM is not scarce - the Javascript JIT compiler keeps bytecode in RAM as long as possible to avoid recompilingMeaning that if you reduce the amount of RAM, you're suddenly taxing your CPU a lot more and the browser might become less responsive. In some environments, such as mobile devices or SSD-based systems that lack a swap file and have limited RAM but have their fair share of CPU power and don't really do multitasking, this could actually lead to a better experience!However, not making use of available RAM is, I think, a bad idea: setting up Firefox to be more aggressive on its memory management might help if you're often running several softwares that each require a lot of RAM, but my own experience tells me that said other software would be the one actually needing to be taught better.The fact that Windows' memory and disk management plainly suck is another indication that it's not browsers that need to slim down - when I run a developer WAMP server, an SVN client, Eclipse, two database clients, Outlook and Word + Excel along with Firefox on 4 Gb of RAM and see the computer slow down to a crawl on 15 linutes checkouts while the equivalent setup in Linux hardly hits the swap file and does a checkout in less than 2 minutes, well, I don't think the browser itself needs fixing... There's better things to do than that.[/citation]
Even without something such as firemin, FF is already one of the most RAM-efficient browsers. True, browsers don't needs as much fixing as other software and Windows do, but it's not like there is anything that can't use fixing in the Windows environment. My point was that unlike what kartu said, memory usage is not a severe problem for all modern browsers. Also, I often use an old laptop with a Turion 64 X2 TL-60 and 2GB of RAM, so yes, I know how things work in RAM-tight situations.
Even with Pale Moon (a FF derivative) without palemin and just under 50 tabs tabs open, Comodo Dragon (a Chromium derivative) with 34 tabs open, a notepad, a calculator, a task manager, and an excel spreadsheet open, I do just fine on this laptop and have about 1.75GB of RAM in use. Granted, I'm running Server 2008r2 X64 instead of Windows 7, but that's still something. It does not slow down to a crawl, although it isn't as fast as it is with less stuff open and even then is obviously not as fast as some of of the higher end desktops that I use.