Present Perfect

My screen not responding to the keyboard. Having to log in to it from another machine. Top telling me X is using 75% of my memory, of which 2 GB are real and 4 GB are virtual. Having to kill firefox and instantly seeing the X memory use drop from 75% to 3.6%

How long are we going to have to put up with Firefox's blatant abuse of memory ? Is it so hard to free a few pixmaps once in a while so that just moving my mouse pointer doesn't cause swap storms ? Shouldn't my packager override whatever insane default is causing firefox to ALWAYS HANG ON TO EVERY SINGLE BIT IT EVER ALLOCATES ? I think I'd gladly switch to whatever distro that manages to do the right thing with firefox.

Update: I've been getting links from people to pages that explain "how to get Firefox's memory use under control." None of these pages address the issue that I seem to have - Firefox is causing X to hold on to way too much memory. Is it storing pixmaps on the X server ? I have no idea. But it is not simply a matter of having a cache of pages.

Regardless - pages that explain how to fix Firefox's memory are not the right solution. Firefox should be *sensible by default*. Whether they want to provide people options to tweak the size of the bullet, the acceleration of the bullet, and the metal alloy used by the bullet they shoot themselves in the foot with, is entirely up to them.

My screen not responding to the keyboard. Having to log in to it from another machine. Top telling me X is using 75% of my memory, of which 2 GB...