Oh, Firefox. I remember way back when you were light and fluffy. I remember when you were the new kid in town and were a blast to play with. You could run around all day and never seem to tire. What happened? You just sat your fat ass down on the couch and ate candy for years and years. You’re fat, bloated, and slow. You now resemble World of Warcraft players. Shame on you for letting yourself go like that. Now when I’m working, I’m forced to use you because you have the right tools, but you make it painful to work very long. You need a diet, and you need some exercise. Move it fatso!
Why can’t Mozilla get its act together and fix the memory bloat that Firefox suffers? It’s been years and years of complaining. Sure, it’s open source and I could dive in if I wanted to, but I can’t afford to; I’m struggling enough as it is. The guys at Mozilla are blow-hards, just like all other big software companies. Microsoft, Google, Apple, Oracle, Mozilla, they’re all the same. They think they can engineer the next best thing, but fail to realize there’s a better solution at hand.
Firefox is an application, a browser, and trying to handle memory management with the program is stupid, silly, and just plain old arrogant. Here’s my solution, and it’s one I’ve heard far and wide for years. Let the operating system clean up after you. The operating systems know how to manage their own memory better than you do, because they wrote the damn thing. The operating system is sitting there waiting with the pooper scooper, but only seems to use it when you fall down with a loud thud. Don’t need memory for a page’s cache anymore? Deallocate it and let the system do the rest. The problem with handling it yourself from within the application is the overwhelmingly common mistake of missing something.
Memory leaks are everywhere, in every program, and trying to not fuck up should be the primary concern. Pitch the blame to someone else, and be done with it. Don’t develop something that’s already done and has no need to be redone. I wonder how much smaller Firefox would be if all the memory management subroutines were removed. I wonder how much faster the program would be without having to determine the best course of action. I wonder if the same shortsightedness has been applied to memory management as was applied to “true random number generation” via the usage of every damn file in the temp folder. I wonder…
I hope this issue is properly addressed when they move over to having each browser tab in its own separate process; Chrome really made them eat poi when they came on board about this. Close a window; dump the process; let the operating system do the rest. When you have an option for such a simple solution to such a horrible problem, you have to have your head shoved so far up your ass that your id and ego get along and play checkers to not use it.