Mozilla programmer responds to Firefox memory leaks

Ben Goodger, a lead engineer for the Mozilla Firefox web browser, acknowledged the memory issues that hasve plagued the browser, but also said that the memory leak is the consequence of a caching feature that stores previously-viewed pages in memory. From Goodger's blog:

To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited < 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last few session history entries. This can be a lot of data. It's a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web.

Users can change this feature, as noted in the article:

1. Type about:config in the browser address bar.


2. Scroll down and find the browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers entry


3. Double-click on that line, and change the value as follows:
   
   
   
   • -1 (default entry based on memory on system)
   
   
   • 0 (no caching)
   
   
   • 1-8 (number of pages to cache)