Um.

Seriously. The Quotient of WTF-itude on this tweet is off the charts.

What kind of crack do you have to be smoking to think that Firefox isn't clearly THE VERY WORST OF THE WORST at memory management?

I don't think that Firefox is even trying to be a good consumer web browser anymore. They seem to be focusing on being a (bloaty) IDE for web developers.

And even on that narrow demographic they're STILL losing ground to Chrome. In fact, I only resort to using Firefox when the Chrome developer tools aren't giving me enough insight on a Javascript error -- which happens but is rare! -- otherwise is STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM FIREFOX AT ALL COSTS.

Modified image courtesy of ToddLP on DeviantArt

"For most users, Firefox doesn't use an abnormally large amount of memory.......... For others, however, Firefox's memory consumption is a major problem."

Source: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Memory_Leak

Hey, but good news, on August 28th we'll get Firefox 15 which will fix add-on bloat.

I'm clearly in the latter group! I find that after 15 minutes on a site with heavy dhtml, FF has slowed down like 50%.

And it just goes downhill from there!

If you Google for slow Firefox you can discover a recommended way to reduce memory usage is to restart Firefox:

Firefox's memory usage may increase if it's left open for long periods of time. A workaround for this is to periodically restart Firefox...

Seems drastic.

Then again, typing about:memory into the awesome bar seems drastic, too.

In practice I have to restart FF often.

But it often hangs and I have to do a force quit, sometimes even losing the tabs that were open.

Not that it's wise to have too many tabs open in FF in the first place.

Safari and Chrome rarely have issues. For me, FF really is just a backup JavaScript console.

Yes, I remember John Lilly blaming the memory leaks on add-ons.

Chrome also has add-ons, but doesn't appear to have a memory leak issue associated with them.

So I guess FF is the best browser if you're using it in a vacuum.

But I hope you're right that this next release will fix the memory management issues. If so I'll give FF another shot. At one time it was my browser of choice (it was awesome around v 2.1), but it steadily got worse and worse since then, at least for the way I use it. Without add-ons it's basically useless as a development tool.

Want the opposite of FireFox?

Try OrcaBrowser!!

It makes more sense to me that an Orca can websurf than a Firefox.

Or a fish. How about a fish browser?

No, whales make more sense. I wonder what browser has the whale-on-whale logo...

And why, when I Google for "whale on whale browser logo", do I find a picture of Whale Rider?

FAIL.