[citation][nom]adamovera[/nom]We tried emptying the bin in WBGP3 (or 4?), it had no effect whatsoever. But I'll try again tomorrow before I wipe the test HDD.[/citation]
I wouldn't bother. This is an urban legend the Opera faithful have been telling themselves for years to try to deny that the memory bug exists. It doesn't work and never has. The other story you'll hear is the nonsensical "if other programs need the memory, Opera will give it back". There's no function in any OS for programs to ask other programs for memory, of course. When you point that out, the next story will be "Memory is there to be used!" Yes, by the OS, for disk and library caches, not Opera.
Opera's bug tracker is "secret", so despite people submitting bug reports for years now, Opera doesn't acknowledge whether they even consider this a bug or not. They don't respond to any questions about how their memory management (doesn't) work, and of course they don't acknowledge or comment on any of Tom's browser battles. They let volunteers moderate their forums (!), and these volunteers find excuses to close and/or delete any thread in which this subject comes up - often with the help of an accomplice who will intentionally use an expletive in a thread to give them the excuse they need. It's ridiculous.
The memory problems are even worse under Linux since Opera uses much more memory in that version. I've found that Opera apparently loads the full web pages that are in its speed dial, because loading Opera with no tabs open but 12 speed dial entries results in the use of 380MB on start-up! Even without speed dial, my tests were still able to leave a situation with no tabs open and 500MB in use (tab recycle bin emptied and memory cache set to off).
Tom's Hardware is the Oprah Winfrey of websites. 🙂 You are too powerful to be denied. I'd weep for joy if you guys and gals were to demand an interview with Opera folks, pretend they were a faulty Intel CPU and grill'em! 🙂 Demand answers - some people have actually had to create their own blogs to discuss Opera issues because the company's own forums were too hostile. You could get them to admit the issue, force them to explain what the heck their browser (isn't) doing, demand to know why they ignored the problem for about two years, make them declassify their bug tracker, bring freedom to the forums, accuse them of chasing Chrome's benchmarks and Firefox's extensions and ignoring Opera's... operishness, and get things back on track! It's not even just the memory issue; that's one of many problems. Auto-completion of .net, .com, .edu stopped working when they made the URL bar into a search bar like Chrome (even though Opera already had a search box so it was just trying to work like Chrome). Forum posts reporting this got no official response (but attacks from the zealots). Filing bug reports got no acknowledgement because of the "secrecy". Now after several versions, the option is STILL there to do auto-completion in the settings! So is it a bug then? Are they going to (someday) give us an option (after more than a year) to go back to the previous behavior? Or will nothing ever happen because they're happy with things as they are? With Opera, we the users never know.
I've been an Opera user since the days of paying for it, but I'm about to switch browsers because it's just ridiculous. Opera is trying to be Chrome and Firefox rather than Opera and bugs go unfixed and cool new features have stopped appearing and really nice ones (like the Opera Unite in-built server) wither on the vine with no new enhancements or development.
Tom's Hardware, like Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're our only hope! Only you can get answers for we the ignored, abused, censored (former and soon-to-be-former) users of Opera!
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