I love progress // tech life - Lograh — LiveJournal

15:00 - I love progress // tech life

I'm so happy that firefox 1.5 finally came out. I'm espicially glad to see that the new version has kept all the great features as the old one, such as the inability to quit properly.. Running a fresh install of windows here, and half the time I close firefox, it leaves the process orphaned. I open task mangager and I see almost 150MB taken up by two processes called "firefox.exe", even when I'm not running firefox. No, I don't have any sort of 'quick-start' feature on, they don't show up till I actually load firefox, they just stick around after I quit. I have to manually kill them to get the memory back.. good thing I've got 2GB on this system or I'd likely feel some hit from that much memory being tied up by ghost processes..

I'm just suprized this type of bug has been allowed to linger. I first noticed it a few versions ago. Shit like this is why Open Source will never truly take off as a majority movement. bargain-basement systems with only 256 or 512MB of ram can't afford having 150 of that eaten up by ghost processes that aren't even supposed to be running. It's an embarrassment, really, to see a programmer not even know how to accurately track the memory usage of the program and return it all to the system when it exits.

Even in the open-source movement, you get what you pay for.