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Pacabel | 11 years ago

What makes you so sure that there was ever only one memory leak? What makes you so sure that one or more new ones haven't been introduced since then?

I've seen and heard a lot of reports from many different Firefox users about Firefox using an unreasonably large amount of memory, even when using fresh installations of the most recent version, and when engaging in very reasonable browsing patterns.

As a software developer faced with a large and frequent volume of reports of such a nature, the only responsible thing to do is to assume that there is truly a problem. This should be assumed even if the developers themselves may be having trouble reproducing the problem. Denying that the problem exists is usually the most counterproductive thing that can be done, because the problem likely does actually exist, and it doesn't get fixed.

By the way, I don't believe that there ever was a Firefox 2.5 release. Perhaps you mean Firefox 3.5?

discuss

dblohm7|11 years ago

Once again, nobody is denying anything about memory problems. But there are two things at play here:

1. One person's experience is not universal. With a web browser as customizable as Firefox, there will be certain configurations causing problems that aren't caught by tests or by dogfooding. Some people are probably seeing leaks that users with a default configuration don't see. For example: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/08/15/the-story-of...

2. People need to report their problems in ways that are actionable. HN is not a bug tracker. If somebody on HN (Hacker News! News for programmers who presumably know how a bug tracker works!) is having memory issues, (s)he should have no problems filing a bug in Bugzilla. Firefox has had about:memory for years now; save that report and attach it to your bug.

icantthinkofone|11 years ago

Users have been reporting memory leaks in Firefox up to and including last week. Users should not be used a source of what a memory leak is cause 80% of users do not know what a memory leak truly is much less be technically competent to recognize and report one.

I often make the error of saying the fix was in version 2.5 but perhaps it was in v1.5 or v2.0. It doesn't matter. They were fixed long ago is my point.