Firefox 3.0 Memory Leak Problem Caused By FireBug

My work computer stays on 24/7 and I like to keep all my applications open, including Firefox 3.0. For months now, I noticed that everyday, my firefox.exe process grows to over 1.5 GB, eating up all my system’s memory.  It was a very annoying problem since it would cause my entire system to become sluggish.  My temporary solution was to restart the browser everyday, until the memory crept back up again. This issue baffled me because I always thought Firefox was supposed to have far superior memory management than other browsers like IE.

I finally decided to investigate the issue and did a Google search for the problem. Most websites recommend altering a couple of settings in the about:configFirefox configuration page. However, these issues did not address the root of the problem and simply gave a non-ideal workaround. However, searching for the solution gave me the idea that perhaps it is one of my FF Plugins that is causing the problem. So I one-by-one, I disabled my plugins and let FireFox run for several hours while I observed the memory usage and voila! I found the culprit…FireBug 1.3.3! After disabling this plugin, I have been running Firefox memory leak free!

I hope this article helps those that are suffering from the same issue!