How can I avoid causing memory leaks in Firefox?

Question

It seems that there is a lot of information on memory leaks in IE and how web developers can avoid them, but I can't find much on avoiding leaks in FF. I've found lots of random tips on how end users can tweak their preferences, or tips for extension developers, but little on what I can do as a web developer to make sure my pages don't leak. Am I missing something? It seems lazy to just blame it on the user and say "you've got too many extensions". Or are the major patterns the same as in IE -- circular references and all that?

Also, if anyone knows of any tools to troubleshoot leaks in FF, that would be great. I found this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2490/ But it's apparently just for chrome and extension development.

Answer 1

Outside of the design patterns to favour the only truely safe way is to test your pages thoroughly. To monitor the memory usage of the browser Task Manager is alright but Process Explorer provides more accurate results.

JavaScript is one cause of memory leaks but be careful with flash movies on pages too. Our content team added a movie from our design department that used a thrid party transition affect and this swallowed 10Mb every 20s or so. Just watching the movie loop through it was obvious in TaskManager to see the memory jump when the affect occured and the it never quite release it all back.

Answer 2

You can force to run a Garbage Collector in FireFox. The Garbadge Collector will destroy & release objects that are not used anymore. The only possibility of "Leaking memory" with a Garbage Collector is not a "leak" but a reference which makes no sense: remove all references to objects that you don't want to use.

Read more on this page:
http://adblockplus.org/blog/different-ways-to-force-garbage-collection