(via Digg)
One Federico Mena Quintero showed a proof-of-concept on how to reduce memory consumption of Mozilla Firefox on your PC.
When you run Mozilla or Firefox and load a web page with images, it stores the uncompressed images as pixmaps in the X server. In particular, it seems to maintain live pixmaps for all the images in all the tabs that you have open; even if a tab is not visible, the images will be in your X server’s memory.
When you exit Firefox, the X server is smart enough to return this memory to the kernel.
Web pages use compressed images, of course, to reduce download time. These images will likely take up a lot of space when uncompressed.
Read more about his explanation here.
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yah flash banners can really bog down firefox, bad firefox, bad :)