I’d like to have a firefox memory monitor, like the unix program top. It would show a list of all of the web pages currently open in different tabs and windows and how much of my system resources they’re each using. At the last, I’d like to know how much memory and CPU each is using, but other things like network connections, bandwidth, etc would be nice to know as well.
Since I’ve been using gmail and google calendar, I frequently find myself watching the water level (memory usage) in bubblefishymon rise until the duck flips over in unhappiness. The only solution seems to be restarting firefox every few days. Other times, I can see that firefox is using 50% of my CPU, but it’s not at all clear which tab is doing it. The main culprits of both memory and CPU usage are clearly javascript and flash, but it would be nice to know when they’re running and what they’re using, so that I could turn them off, avoid leaving certain pages open, or just avoid certain pages altogether.
Obviously, I’m not the first person to notice firefox’s memory issues. There was a post a while ago on techcrunch talking about the forthcoming release of firefox 3 and comparing its memory usage to flock. There’s also a feature request on bugzilla requesting an about:memory page in mozilla, which kind of addresses this issue, but only in a very developer-centric way.
I was reading the restrictions Apple places on developers who plan to use their new iPhone SDK, and it says “no background processes”, which means that tabbed browsing is explicitly denied. Javascript and flash could not be written to do this, I suspect, and now we can guess the reason: it might interfere with a phone call or cause network congestion if messages are not processed immediately. So i think a safari monitor might also be in the works…
did you see this on the techcrunch page you linked to:
“There are some settings for firefox which allow you to tune the memory usage. Can’t remember them, but a google search should turn them up quickly.”