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(Unverified)Apr 11th 2006 5:34AM

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a common confusion that is prevalent with the firefox memory leak is the "its not a leak, its a feature" routine. As it so happens, many people have got two completely different issues confused.

Firefox 1.5's fast back/fast forward feature catches the last visted pages, which is what causes the "its a feature" leak, and can be tweaked by the browsercache element in about:config

Hopwever, the tab memory leak is completely different. What happens is that firefox refuses to release memory from closed tabs (and not because of the catching feature, this big has existed since 1.0 and possibly earlier).What it supposedly does is reuse the memory and does not release it to the OS. However, that dosent work quite well, ot seems, as there is always an upward progression and never a downward one. Which means that firefox is still demanding more memory instead of reusing the old memory fully.

That in effect means heavy tab users like me very quickly use up availiable memory, specially when combined with firefox's uncompressed images bug.

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