Firefox: Down Memory Lane

I’m conducting a bit of a survey and I’ll need your help. It’s all about Firebox, the browser I love, and how it breaks my heart every day. Do you love Firefox? Then please help me with an intervention.

If you have Firefox open now and you’re running Windows, go to your Task Manager^[1] and click on the Processes tab. Look for the process called firefox.exe and make a note of the number in the Mem Usage column^[2]. Then go to your Firefox toolbar, click Help, then About Mozilla Firefox and make a note of the current version you’re running. Then come here and post this in the comments along with the number of tabs (or tabs and windows) you currently have open. Would also help if you said which OS you’re running.

Update: Adam provides instructions for Mac: you can find the memory usage by opening Activity Monitor (in utilities), looking for Firefox in the Process Name column, and seeing what the Real Memory usage is.

Eric provides Ubuntu instructions: you can check out the memory usage under System > Administration > System Monitor, but you’ll have to convert the stats from MiB.

You don’t have to restart your computer or browser or anything like that. I just want to get a snapshot of how much memory Firefox uses for different people. The more data I can collect, the better. I’ll start:

Memory Usage: 920,200K | 11 tabs | Firefox 3.5.7 | Windows XP

Yes, that memory usage is real. Remember the days when Firefox would only use around 300,000K? Or even the long ago when 100,000 was reasonable? Ah, nostalgia.

I showed you mine, now show me yours.

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Notes

1. Right click on the taskbar to find it. Or hit Ctrl Alt Delete. [↩]
2. If the number keeps changing, you can round off to the nearest hundred thousand. Like 350,000 or whatnot. [↩]