Firefox "memory leak"

I recently came across 2 mentions of a memory leak in Firefox. So what is a memory leak? Well Wikipedia defines a memory leak as "A memory leak is unnecessary memory consumption by a computer program. The most common manifestion is the failure to release unused memory that has been allocated by the operating system. A memory leak occurs when the program loses the ability to free the memory, neglects to free memory it no longer needs, or uses memory outside the address range allocated to it."

So when you are using tabbed browsing in Firefox the browser will begin to tie up memory. If you look in your task manager you will see Firefox at the top most often and start to use more and more memory. The reason this was done in the past is that with dial up the browsers would cache previous information thus switching back to that tab would be quicker. With broadband this is not necessary.

So to turn this off simple open up firefox and type about:config
find the browser_total_viewers setting the value to a O by right clicking on that line and select modify and change it from -1 to 0 and your fixed.