[paulddraper]

Unfortunately, this behavior is common across all major browsers. There is a Chromium bug for it (http://crbug.com/315190), but no responses as of yet.

[robmcm]

This isn't going to be trivial to fix, it would require the vm to provide a different taylored scope to each function.

[paulddraper]

Unfortunately, you are right. I am optimistic, however.

IE used to not GC cyclical JS/DOM references. Google Chrome is doing a massive rework of DOM garbage collection with Oilpan.

You are right that it is not a trivial change, but there is nothing technically infeasible about GC'ing per closure. I think it is worth it, just as it was worth it for IE to have smarter GC.

[esailija]

They are not going to "fix it", it is working as intended with the deliberate tradeoff because almost no real world code is affected by it.