Opera 9 Beta

Originally Posted by Merv Burger

but I don't know where people pull out numbers beyond 100 MB

Simple, if you always leave the browser open (I keep the same instance open forever, like I do with mIRC).

Originally Posted by Merv Burger

Firefox stores it's tabs into your RAM, which will obviously force it to run higher in RAM usage, especially with a larger amount of tabs. This is opposed to Opera, which stores it's tabs in a cache on the hard drive, and just keeps reference to the tabs.

So it's a tradeoff, do you want a lower RAM usage with higher hard drive reads, or higher RAM usage. Some would argue the RAM swapping would be faster, but I've yet to notice any difference.

That's just fine and dandy. The problem is that Firefox doesn't try to limit itself. For example, virtually all programs that use the hard disk for caching will provide options for allocating the maximum space it will use -- users won't be happy if their program just eats up all the hard disk space available.

On the other hand there's no readily accessible option for RAM usage in Firefox (if one even exists). And trim-on-minimize isn't even a default option, you actually have to create an entry in the configuration for it -- not to mention that few people will ever find out about it in the first place.

I'm sorry, but this is bad programming.

Jam it back in, in the dark.