Firefox 2.0.0.13 Memory Usage

Mozilla's Firefox browser had me update to the newest version earlier this week, version 2.0.0.13. Usually this isn't such a big deal. Mozilla puts out a good web browser that so far has beaten hands down anything Microsoft has out (Internet Explorer). Yesterday though I noticed a problem with Firefox. It seemed that it was using a lot of memory, a lot more than usual. I thought maybe it was just my work machine, considering I was playing streaming music on it through pandora.com as well as running a few development environments.

Last night I thought I'd test it out. Before I went to sleep I opened up Firefox to an ordinary web page, one without any video, audio or flash running. I left the browser open all night while I slept. This morning I awoke and checked the memory usage for firefox.exe. It was using over a gigabyte of memory, on a machine with only two gigabytes available! I don't know what the problem is, but it seems Mozilla has a serious flaw in this version of Firefox. If you use Firefox and haven't already updated to version 2.0.0.13, don't. Wait until they come out with the next version. I assume I won't be the only one experiencing this problem and Mozilla should kick out a new version pretty quickly. Hopefully sooner than later...