UPDATED 10-6-2010

I use Firefox (currently 3.6.8) as my preferred web browser and won’t use IE unless I have to. This week, I had to temporarily switch to IE after running into a Firefox / plugin memory leak. A little back history first. I give a PC games on Gaming Bee and I regularly hunt down new sources for video games.

This week, I bought Total Annihilation from GOG.com and tried to download it. It was a large download, of approximately 1 gigabyte in size. Firefox immediately started hogging memory. Eventually it froze up and stopped responding using over 1.6 gigabytes of RAM in the process. I reluctantly killed the firefox process and restarted the browser. Upon retrying the large download, I hit the same problem again. Firefox RAM utilization was climbing as the download progressed. Internet Explorer didn’t have the problem, so I figured it was something with my browser or an add-on.  One at a time, I began removing add-ons to find the culprit. In my case, it was the Firebug add-on. Removing the Firebug add-on allowed Firefox to return to normal memory usage while downloading large files.

Your mileage may vary, but after further research, I’ve found some have the same problem with the YSlow add-on as well. Let me know in the comments if you experience the same problem!

UPDATE 10/6/2010

With Firebug versions 1.7x this has been resolved! You can get the latest Firebug here.