Christy Burton: Mark in the UK writes that he’s been watching since the early episodes of Miro, still yet to watch it live as I have the timekeeping skills of Homer Simpson. I'm right with you. But I will one of these days. Anyway to my question, you wanted some more Windows-based ones. So, on both Windows XP and Windows Vista 64-bit, if I have Firefox open for too long, say overnight, it starts to become a memory hog. It’s currently at 300 megabytes and starts causing random freezes while using it. Watching a YouTube video on Firefox when it’s doing this is impossible, is I keep missing bits of the action, it also affects normal browsing, for example when scrolling the page, it will freeze for a second before finally catching up. My PC isn’t slow either. I have 2.5 Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2 gigs of DDR2 RAM. That should be more than enough for a browser.
So, Mark writes, I've looked around on the Mozilla support forum for help but not found anything concrete, just that other people have had similar problems.
Robbie Ferguson: People tell me I don’t pronounce it right.
Christy Burton: So then how would you know if I pronounced it right?
Robbie Ferguson: Mozilla.
Christy Burton: Mozilla.
Robbie Ferguson: Mozilla. I don’t know, Mozilla. I think—
Christy Burton: Mozilla.
Robbie Ferguson: I think about Godzilla.
Christy Burton: Yeah.
Robbie Ferguson: And you know the movie.
Christy Burton: Yeah, that’s a good way to remember.
Robbie Ferguson: Yeah, Mozilla, Godzilla.
Christy Burton: Now do you want to take care of that or do you—
Robbie Ferguson: Oh there's more questions?
Christy Burton: There’s one last little bit.
Robbie Ferguson: Sure, yeah go ahead, if it’s related.
Christy Burton: Well it’s not really related but I'm going to read it anyways.
Robbie Ferguson: Sure.
Christy Burton: As a final happier note, I work for a camera chain in the UK called Jessops and I’d like to tell you that most of our 300—our store’s computer systems are running on Linux.
Robbie Ferguson: Cool! Very good, looking at your Firefox problem, I haven’t have that happened but I'm not much of a Windows user myself so—but I do know that—I don’t want to use the term memory leak but I know Flash in particular, the Flash plug-ins tend to have problems on certain systems. I know my wife’s laptop is running Ubuntu and has had this problem where, if she leaves a website open that has a Flash object on that website, be it YouTube or anything, even just a banner, her computer will slow to a crawl until she closes that Firefox window.
I'm not sure that it’s a Firefox problem. I think it’s more of a flash problem, so—because it doesn’t seem to happen when she’s got just like text pages open or pages that are just graphical but no flash. I would try—I'm not going to point the finger at Firefox right away. What I would try is bring up a website, because you say that this is happening all the time. Let’s try first of all, bring up YouTube and—or anything that has a flash object just there. It doesn’t have to be running, it doesn’t have to be playing, it’s just got to be loaded and leave your computer overnight, come back to it in the morning, see if it’s doing that thing, if it’s really crawling. If it is, then okay, move on and then the next night, bring up a page, Google, something that has absolutely no Flash objects whatsoever. Go back to it in the same amount of time. Tell me if you're still having that same problem that morning because I’d be out to think that it’s probably going to be a Flash issue. But let’s find out just by running that little test for me, okay? And just post me live at Category5.tv once you’ve run that. It will take you two nights and we’ll be able to know a little bit more about what's causing the problem.
I hope—
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