You Can’t Suck Enough

Time to cut down?

Wow, Firefox is zero for two this month…even if it is by association. I’m a Web developer (shut up about the site, douche) and not so long ago switched over from the drudgery of IE7 to FF3 as my standard, regular, wake up in the morning next to her browser.

IE7 decided to have a stroke and die on my machine (despite a recent rebuild of the machine) that seems to resemble dimentia. It started with 1 out of 10 times I’d load the browser it would sit there stuck trying to connect to a site and no matter what you did (stopped, clicked a bookmark, whatever), it had no idea how to do its job. Over time that escalated until it was 8 out of 10 times.  Meanwhile, Firefox, you mynx, delivered Web site after Web site like a slave girl delivering grapes.

So, I made the switch and never looked back. Until, I started noticing how things would slow down towards the end of the day. Nothing too major but if you left and came back 15 minutes later it would take a little while for things to get humming along. At first, I thought, maybe it’s that Western Digital “Green” drive I got, not realizing “green” means “slower”. But then I checked the processes running. Now, I’m running SQL Server (Developer Edition) and Visual Studio 2005, both memory hogs but surprisingly they were up there but not the worst offender. No, the worst offender at 500 MB of my precious 2GB of RAM was Fire-fucking-Fox.

Where's the Downsize button?

Hurgh? What in blazes does a fucking browser need 500 MB to run? I run some add-ons like Firebug and Web Developer Toolbar. So I did the diagnostic thing and turned everything off and then brought them back in one at a time.

Step one: Everything. 160MB -> 46MB. So, we have a culprit. Then waste a lot of time doing this:

What does it all mean? Add-Ons + Multiple tabs and windows + a few hours = memory hog. And, it seems I’m not the only one complaining about this…there are even how-to‘s dedicated to memory and Firefox! (I like the offline cache…512MB??)  But, c’mon, the average user isn’t going to even know there’s a problem…except to know that when they run Firefox, things seem to slow down.

Now, while I’m putting a lot of the blame on the add-on creators, it’s not all them. Look at how much memory is required to open ONE friggin extra tab. 9MB? So much for Open Source…maybe the problem isn’t that a bunch of disparate virtualized coders are about as easy to organize as a herd of cats.

Maybe it’s the same problem that Microsoft has…you know that big company where you could not meet 90% of the company even if you spent 10 years there. Maybe the problem is, we’re too used to the idea that with plentiful memory, the maxim that dictates that an organism, given an environment of a specific size, will grow to fit that environment. And don’t get me started with Chrome…

Maybe it’s time we sell PCs with 256MB of RAM and force developers to remember how to keep things tidy and need. Maybe–oh, wait, there’s a new version of FireFox out! I should get some more RAM and download that sucker!

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