Firefox, The Little Memory Hog
Firefox, The Little Memory Hog lived happily together with his family, the Mozillas, in a land far far away. Firefox had now turned 2.0.0.1 and it was time to attend kindergarten.
On the way there he walked past his favorite tree, IE [ay-ee]. IE was a son of a beech, and he tried to make a lot of friends. Unfortunately, the problem was that IE spoke a language of its own, unlike what all others spoke, so no one understood him. For instance, when IE tried to wave, everyone else perceived it as him giving them the finger.
So, suffice to say, IE didn’t get many friends because of its lack of wanting to change and try to adapt to others. Long ago, IE had a Scottish cousin from the MacIntosh clan, who was much better at adapting, but they had a falling out, so now, no more Macs at the IE family reunions.
In the kindergarten class, Firefox had two friends: Opera and Safari. Opera wasn’t the cutest kid on the block, but he was as fast as lightning as soon as he got any task to do. However, as opposed to IE, Opera wanted to be friends with everybody, so he pretended to understand all kind of languages and properties. This sometimes failed, though, because pretending to be a local doesn’t always work unless you behave exactly as the locals under all circumstances.
Safari, in turn, was oh-so-dashing and everyone thought she was very beautiful. But, like with many beautiful things in the world, beauty isn’t everything. Most of the time, Safari got along with the other kids, but, at occasions, Safari acted completely perplexed when it came to some interaction with the others. This led to some misunderstanding and harsh words, but in the long run, her beauty and fantastic ability to look good in all the garment from the world-wide brand CSS made people forgive her.
One day, the teachers at the kindergarten realized that Firefox was eating a lot of memory, much more than it should. They naturally got worried by this, and scheduled a meeting with Mr. and Mrs. Mozilla to talk about this. However, their response was just that “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature”. Somewhat worried about this attitude, the teachers could do nothing else but accept it. After all, Firefox was the brightest kid in class with a bright and promising future, so they they felt that it was no need to try and quench Firefox lust for life at his early age.
And that, my friends, is how life passes by in a land known to us mere mortals as Browsers.
You forgot Lynx!
π
Wonderful!
Bah, Opera would steal that wimp Firefox's lunch money.
LOL π
If Firefox doesn't start going on a diet, I'll probably be moving over to Opera for my daily browsing….especially since I heard about this: http://www.css3.info/blog/css3-in-future-opera-bu…
Robert,
Much as I love my Firefox, and all its must-have extensions, that's hilarious!
Maybe this could be informative to Moz FF clan members:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_mode
Obvious best line in the story (still chuckling over this one):
<blockquote cite="http://www.robertnyman.com/2007/01/23/firefox-the-little-memory-hog/">IE was a son of a beech
Great reading! Well done and bravo.
Man, this is just too funny. π
Funny stuff. For the record, I absolutely love Firefox. Even though 2.0 does seem to eat 6 chips off of my RAM stick.
Highly imaginative and very funny indeed ! Thanks for sharing lovely story with us.
I'm glad you liked it! π
Maybe Lynx will make an appearance in the future…
Devon, Johan,
Thanks for the links!
Anyone who thinks Firefox is a memory hog has no understanding of computer science or how computers work. Available memory is there to be used, would you prefer it not be used? Why do you buy extra memory if you don't want it to be used? Would you prefer Office to run in 64K just so it doesn't use available memory? At least Firefox will free up that extra memory if other apps need it when Office won't.
Doesn't anyone understand this?
Robert, what a wonderful story. I had so much fun reading it! -But thanks, "Ayyy-Eeee" is stuck in my head now.. that cheeky "son of a beech", always poking around where he's not wanted. π
Wonderfully put! When I'm writing code, I build for browsers in the following order:
1) Firefox
2) Safari
3) IE
4) Whatever's left
I recently wrote about some of my issues with Safari and Firefox: Safari Bugs (Bring on OS 10.5 Leopard)
[…] s for JAWS users – Juicy Studio, Gez Lemon – a great site for best practices and standards Firefox, the Little Memory Hog – Robert Nyman – the story I told about Fire […]
Pat, Shane,
I'm happy to hear that you liked it! π
Lovely story. Liked the "… it's a feature" best.
Stefan,
Good! π
Robert,
What a great read!
Shane,
Looks like we have some common rant topics… π
Tobie,
Thanks! π
that's a cute story! firefox all the way!
Mark,
I'm glad you liked it!
It was a funny article to read, but Opera is of course a 'she' (Latin ending -a is feminine).
Keep up the good work!
Jonathan,
Ah, maybe… π
And thanks!
[…] is, after all, very fast and good at rendering CSS (remember the fairy tale?), and I guess that people used to the lukewarm designs of Internet Explorer and Firefox will […]
Yes, I've found Firefox uses a lot ! of memory, somtimes 200 MB or more. Downright obscene in my book. Also, it does not free up memory, I've frequently had my system at virtual = 120 % of real, and Firefox continung to use 100 to 200 MB, plus Firefox does periodically go into a high cpu condition, where I often shut down the whole app and start over.
If I was running only Firefox on a machine, it would run great, but I run several apps which also use 100 to 500 MB; before not too long, it's used up my 1 to 1.5 GB ram.
Don't get me wrong, I really do love Firefox, I just wish they would make it run more efficiently!
I'm in tech support for a large corporation, and when debugging network or web app performance problems, I often ask the user: "Do you run IE or a good browser?" Some people get it. π
Bill H,
Yeah, I can imagine that just some people do. π
nice and funny story! I ended up here searching for a solution to ff eating up so much memory but seems like will be coming back many times to read interesting stuff here… π tc
pearl,
Glad you liked it, and welcome here!
Brilliant. A great laugh.
Kevin,
Good! π
Looking forward to Firefox 3. The features and enhancements are said to include…
Fingers crossed!
Barliesque,
Sounds good!
I suggest people look for enigma browser and download it from http://store.democratz.org
You can find the link just above the products and you can download it for free.
Engima runs faster than Firefox and you can easily run 32 tabs and not slow down the machine.
[…] Safari, Google Chrome and Opera that are also all very competent web browsers. And, sure, at times Firefox is still a memory hog, but lots of fantastic work is constantly being done on improving it, and I know that virtually […]
[…] Safari, Google Chrome and Opera that are also all very competent web browsers. And, sure, at times Firefox is still a memory hog, but lots of fantastic work is constantly being done on improving it, and I know that virtually […]
[…] Safari, Google Chrome and Opera that are also all very competent web browsers. And, sure, at times Firefox is still a memory hog, but lots of fantastic work is constantly being done on improving it, and I know that virtually […]
[…] Firefox, the Little Memory Hog – Robert Nyman – the story I told about Firefox, Internet Explorer and how the Macintosh is no longer invited to IE reunions. It’s another great site highlighting best practices and standards. Robert has several JavaScript libraries available. […]