Why is your web browser using so much memory?

Abstract

Browsers are the operating systems of the Web. They support a vast universe of applications written in a modern garbage-collected programming language. Browsers expose a rich platform API mostly implemented in C++. Browsers are also consumer software with low switching costs in an intensely competitive market. Thus in addition to standard requirements such as maximizing throughput and minimizing latency, browsers have to consider issues like-when the user closes a window while watching Task Manager, they want to see memory usage go down. Browsers have to compete to minimize memory usage even for poorly written applications. In this talk I will elucidate these requirements and describe how Firefox and other browsers address them. I will pay particular attention to issues that we don't know how to solve, and that could benefit from research attention.