Firefox admits memory problem

A leading member of the Mozilla board says that the Firefox team is working hard to plug the memory leaks that have afflicted the open-source browser. Firefox frequently draws criticism for its alleged memory leakage, with the browser consuming more and more of a PC's system resources the longer it remains open.

The Firefox team has long denied that there's any significant memory leakage in the browser, but now a Mozilla board member claims addressing the issue has become a high priority, as Mozilla looks to take the browser on to mobile devices.

"For a long time, there have been a lot of complaints about the memory usage in Firefox and anything else that used the Gecko engine. And looking at the numbers for what Firefox would use

For memory, they seemed valid," Blizzard writes on his blog. "As Mozilla starts down the path to running in the mobile space we are spending time looking at memory pressure issues more closely."

Blizzard claims new tests have shown the problem doesn't lie in leaks, as such, but the way in which memory is fragmented by the browser. Illustrations on developer Stuart Parmenter's site show how the browser is stealing more memory than it actually needs.