A brief discussion regarding Firefox memory issues came about on CyberNet News in regards to the Internet Explorer 7 Release About The Same As Firefox 2 article.  One of the comments left by ‘Dave’:

“In my opinion, we could see quite a few people move from Firefox to IE7. In the pre Firefox 1.5 days, there was this huge Firefox movement. But during the 1.5 builds, I’ve seen tons of people grow tired of the memory leaks and other bugs associated with Firefox such as the copy/paste bug.”

In the month or so now that I been using Firefox 2 as my primary browser I have seen an improvement in the memory leak issue.  Further though, in the past couple weeks since the RC1 milestone I have seen a much larger reduction in memory use.  During this time there was a huge surge of extension updates to work with Firefox 2.

I did a quick check of my memory usage with Flock, Firefox and Thunderbird:

• Flock ~ 77MB (1 tab opened)
• Firefox 2 ~62MB (4 tabs opened)
• Thunderbird ~ 27MB

I can remember when Firefox 1.5 was using 2 to 3 times the memory as Firefox 2 is using  right now.  So this is a really good sign Mozilla has plugged the memory leaks in Firefox 2!  Hopefully those who switched away due to memory issues with 1.5 builds will give Firefox another try when version 2 comes out later this month.