If 4GB now costs the same as 512MB then, then in the sense of 'dollars worth of memory required to perform function X acceptably,' memory hasn't actually gotten any cheaper. Ten years ago you could surf the web with 512MB of RAM now we're getting to the point where 4GB isn't considered enough. 'Memory is cheap,' we like to say, but it's really only true if you're not wasting it like crazy all the time. I don't know what their internal rationale is. as if Mozilla went from being totally dismissive of memory complaints to being hyper-responsive to memory complaints with no (publicly stated) rationale behind the change. It would be interesting to see the reasoning behind this (if only from an intellectual standpoint), particularly given that in many cases I tend to feel that it would have been better to simply be a bit more diplomatic when rejecting memory-based bug reports.

On the other hand, there have been plenty of times when eagerly performing image decompression would make my browsing a bit smoother.Īll in all, it seems (from a not-particularly-in-touch outsider perspective) as if Mozilla went from being totally dismissive of memory complaints to being hyper-responsive to memory complaints with no (publicly stated) rationale behind the change. Speaking just from my personal usage: I don't think there has ever been a time where delaying the image decompression on a page would ever have had any utility for me (at least from a memory standpoint). On the other hand, waiting to decompress/decode images until they are visible to the user means that there are obviously going to be performance trade-offs (and also, obviously, design/engineering trade-offs).

On the one hand, obviously keeping memory usage down is good. Like many of the other Firefox memory changes, this one leaves me feeling a little ambiguous.

Why does firefox take up so much memory