[windle]

As a bunch of other people in the comments have noted, Firefox can take a huge amount of memory, the one thing they also have in common.... is the Firebug extension. It should come as no surprise to them then that Firefox is not actually leaking the memory... Firebug is. A quick Google search for "Firebug memory leak" will lead to multiple examples of massive Firebug memory leaks.

It's a bummer that Firefox gets the blame for Firebug's memory leaks. If people would like to avoid that, the best thing would be to use Firefox's multiple profile feature so that they activate/install Firebug in a Developer profile, and keep their general browsing profile without Firebug. It's rather amazing just how much, and how fast Firebug can leak memory as using a separate profile will make abundantly clear.

http://lifehacker.com/5481213/master-multiple-firefox-profil...

[emp_]

Browsers are platforms, wouldn't be the same to blame Firefox lack of developer environment?

[windle]

Good point, I forgot to mention that Firefox is expanding the developer tools it comes with:

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/08/16/new-tools-in-mozilla...

Also, it hasn't landed in Nightly yet, but there's some really slick dev tools that are being built into Firefox:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/07/tilt-visualize-your-web-pag...

There's some nice CSS and Javascript tools coming too, but I can't seem to find any URL's on them at the moment.

[syncsynchalt]

I didn't know this, but to be fair webkit's inspector is as good as firebug for my needs and doesn't leak.

Maybe the answer is to roll firebug into default firefox to force the issue and get the leaks addressed?