For quite some time now, I have been a very keen advocate of Firefox. From pushing people to leave Internet Explorer to defending it against the up and coming Chrome, I have long been firmly in the Mozilla camp. I love the customisability that it offers, the spell checking within fields, the way pages render and the overall functionality and use of it.

However, for a few releases now, I have been feeling a bit of pain. With the release of the latest version, 3.6, I and many others were hoping the pain would go away - however it has not. In fact, it's worse than ever.

So what's the pain I am talking about? Memory leaks.

The problem is, every time I open a new tab, or refresh a website, Firefox chews up another 2 or 3 - or 10 - megs of RAM; and it never lets go.

For someone like me, who runs a business through web based software, as well as doing a lot of web development and tweaking, I have several web pages open (in tabs) all day long and I refresh these very frequently. Chewing up another 10 megs of RAM every few minutes means that Firefox can be using over a gigabyte of memory before too long and the speed impact, even on my 8 core, 16GB of RAM computer, is very noticeable. I find if Firefox has been open for half a day or so, the hit is so bad my mouse is beginning to lag behind my movements.

Worse still, ridiculous actions like use of AJAX controls within a page also result in more memory being chewed up. So even if I am not refreshing a page but simply scrolling around in it, I will lose more resources.

The only way to get them back is to close Firefox and reopen it - a real pain as I will then have to log back in to my intranet or any other sites.

I am not the only one with this problem.

So for the time being, I am stuck with having to consider Chrome - and lose many of the features I love about Firefox - or just restart my browser constantly.

I am not happy with either outcomes.

Update: This issue has been resolved and can be fixed by updating your JRE, here.