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(Unverified)Mar 12th 2009 4:53PM

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Firefox alone consumes around 25MB RAM. Selectively installing addons ups that to 35MB. However, the trend is toward bigger and bigger addons (see above,) many which consume several times Firefox alone, which too soon renders Firefox unusably sluggish. The problem isn't simply the initial memory consumed but increasing amounts of memory consumed not recovered until restarting. Instead of finding ways of increasing Firefox's memory footprint, I propose finding ways to recover Firefox memory that are Tested and Shown To Work without restarting Firefox. There are too many ways of consuming RAM and not enough to get it back.

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(Unverified)Mar 12th 2009 5:02PM

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First off, thanks for the write up, Lee. Contact me any time if you have questions or want details. There's a lot more coming -- the plugin integration will be a springboard into all sorts of things, particularly integration on other sites.

@minibar Keep in mind this isn't a FireFox add-on. It's a *real* plugin, like Flash or Quicktime is a plugin. There aren't that many real plugins out there because they're hard to write. Writing an add-on isn't much harder than writing a web page. There's really a huge difference. It also means FireFox is no different from any other browser -- it works the same in all of them with some additional ActiveX required for IE.

The memory issue is actually very simple: it's just the JavaScript on the web page itself. The actual plugin is extremely lightweight, and we just have to resist doing too much fancy AJAX to keep that JavaScript memory footprint low, but that's back in the realm of "easy." If the plugin itself consumed a lot of memory, that would be much more of an issue!

Thanks again Lee. I'm here at SXSW if you're around!

-Adam

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