I’m still not sure whether it was a memory leak or just a malfunctioning in the memory deallocation process, the certain thing is that my browser was definitely not behaving as expected. A few days ago my pc was heavily working while I was just visiting a couple of websites at the same time. So I checked the task manager and I noticed that Firefox (version 3.5.5) had allocated something like 700MB of memory and, having many other applications running and “only” 2GB of RAM, the Windows paging had started rearranging the memory making the computer almost unusable.

Yesterday, after an entire working day, I purposely closed all the navigation tabs (leaving the default white page) and double-check again the memory usage. Result? The memory space deallocated during that operation was really little while the allocated space remained around 200 MB:

Eventually I discovered the problem was related to a recently installed plugin, Tree Style Tab, which was mentioned by Enoela here and I’ve found very useful especially at work. So, once deactivated such plugin everything reverted to normality. It’s a pity I can’t hierarchically organize my tabs. I think I will try again with an updated version.. Has anyone ever had a similar problem with that plugin or it is just a sporadic case?

Tags: Firefox 3.5.5 | Memory Leak | Tree Style Tab