Netscape 8 is having some serious memory leakage

50,224k, that's average, it's gotten as high as 71443k. This is crazy.....

 

That is why I dropped it

 

2. questions

1. What do you recommend for slow pc? Opera 8? Firefox?

2. When does Ie7 come out, I might go back to that.

 

The gecko engine is used by Netscape, Firefox, Mozilla, Beonex, & K-meleon. ALL of them have memory leaks. It's endemic with the gecko engine itself. For instance, take a look at the relatively long history of bug #174604 as recorded HERE. AFAIK this bug (& others in its family) haven't yet been cleared up.

See also the recent FF-board's post HERE.

I use K-mel. Of the other gecko-based browsers, the only one I have tried lately is Firefox. IMHO, K-mel is a hair faster than Firefox, & also leaks MUCH less -- perhaps this is because K-Meleon uses the native Windows UI rather than Firefox's XUL. Even so, I close K-mel after ~2 hours of surfing, then re-open it again. Doing so greatly reduces memory usage.

 

Opera 8.01 works very very well even on an slower comp. I have four browsers and opera is my default.

 

1. Opera

Even if I use Firefox, I have to admit Opera is lighter in resources than Firefox. It's the extensions, no banner, simple and open source that keep me with firefox.

 

Oh Boy, I dread to ask this, but what is a memory leak?

Thanks,
Jerry

 

More than a few well-known programs are reputed to have memory leaks. It's just more noticeable in a browser because web surfing involves repetitively opening/closing web pages -- each time a page is closed, a teeny bit of memory doesn't get freed up.

The blessings of the Gecko engine (especially K-meleon) FAR outweigh this issue. As I mentioned earlier, all you need to do is close or minimize K-meleon every few hours. This works fine on my granddaughter's computer (233 Mhz cpu, 150MB ram) -- K-mel never gets heavier than 21-23 MB.