Firefox has been my favorite brower for the past year or two but upgrading to the latest 1.5 is starting to change that. Looks like the latest release has a big problem with memory leaks. I have browsed on previous versions for hours and hours and not even a single crash but the latest 1.5 has been crashing way too often. There have been times when I have seen it using about 200MBs of RAM! This is insane considering that I only had four of five tabs open none of which had anything that would require any special memory considerations.
So I started looking around and found a page that demonstrated Firefox’s javascript leaks. Fire up task manager and then this page in firefox, then watch how the memory usages spikes up! Now, even if you close that tab the memory usuage will stay the same. Due to time constraints I haven’t looked into the reason but for now I am just going to downgrade to 1.0.7, the last version that seemed to be working fine.