Hogging memory the Firefox way!
Check this screen snapshot out. I captured it a minute ago. At times I want to take Firefox out with a friggin’ laser beam. Doesn’t matter whether I open more tabs or close them, Firefox continues to increase its memory consumption. In a time where low-cost computing promises to become a reality, and where web apps are migrating more and more of the functionality of a PC over to the network, Firefox (and memory hog browsers in general) are just raining on our parade! What is the deal? Have we trashed the garbage collector or what?
On a serious note, what I’m pointing out actually has usability implications for computing in the developing world, and for low-cost computing in general. We’ve discussed emerging low-cost hardware platforms like the OLPC, the Eee PC and the Cloudbook in the past. All of these machines have a few hundred megs of RAM and a fairly slow processor. And their disk performance isn’t quite something to write home about. Paging isn’t quite their strong suite! What these hardware platforms need are lean apps that share the compute burden between local and network resources. We were told Web 2.0 apps were going to fit precisely this bill.
The whole model comes crashing to the ground, though, when the app that was supposed to be a mere window into the network, i.e. the browser, ends up sucking more than the total amount of memory available on low-end systems. And it’s not just the memory; as more applications make use of AJAX, it becomes clear that the computation is still happening on the client, but now in a new, far more ineffecient way. You’ve got the physical system, the base OS, maybe a Hypervisor, then the client OS, then the browser, then the VM (Java plugin, Javascript interpreter, Flash or whatever else) operating in a sandbox. Yup, that’s one way to maintain 286 performance levels with a multi-way quad core system.
Unless we fix this painful problem, web apps, AJAX and inexpensive computing are all going to remain dreams while Microsoft continues to sell $120 client operating systems like hot cakes. If you complain about Windows not being a good/reliable/fast OS, wait till you start using Firefox as your OS!
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