Topic: Memory Leaks

[GillE]

I've read recently that some internet browsers have memory leaks, especially as more and more tabs are opened.  What does this mean?

[sam]

In essence, they don't clear the usage of RAM, so they just keep growing and growing. Its a rather common thing in software, once you have allocated memory space and then finished with it you should unallocate it. Take a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_leak - has an example of it in open text.

[Clive]

Oh that's very interesting!  It explains a lot doesn't it? 

[Rik]

It does.

[GillE]

Thanks for your help, Sam - I've heard that FF is particularly prone to memory leaks whereas Chrome is less so.

[Simon]

Earlier versions of FF were notorious for memory leaks, but I think they've improved it a bit now.

[sam]

and Chrome is just simply well developed, and of course its multithreaded (firefox will be, isn't yet). - i.e. each tab is a new task on your machine