All by itself firefox is caperble of filling both my ram and my 1gig swap partition (or at least I assume it is because they empty as soon as I close firefox), I would like to limit this. Any advice how?

browser.cache.memory.enable is set to true, and I tried limiting the memory use in browser.cache.memory.capacity but it didn't work.

I experienced that once, and it freaked me out, but that was still Firefox 1.5

* Have you upgraded to Firefox 2.0 already? (which for some silly political reasons had to be renamed to Icedove in Debian)

* Some "problematic" extensions can cause such memory leaks. Maybe you should check whether one of yours is affected and look for an alternative or an updated version.

cheers
~fab

I'm still in 1.5, I don't really want to upgrade either. Its not my extensions according to that list.

P.S. IceDove is thunderbird for a valid political reason. IceWeasel is firefox

I don't consider the "valid" reasons valid really. It's just an example of how people want to make small things big.

I assume you already searched the bug files for your FF version?

Umh, yeah, you're right! Darn. There you have it, Mozilla Foundation, thanks to you I'm confused.

(I'm using Swiftfox 2.0 build for Debian, anyway.)

--

But if you are experiencing this w/ Firefox 1.5, and I experienced it with Firefox 1.5, and some other also, then perhaps it's a bug and you have no other choice than upgrading?

Why don't you try out the Debian package of Swiftfox 2.0 first, from http://getswiftfox.com/debian.htm ?
It can be installed parallel to your existing Firefox 1.5 installation.
Don't forget to backup your ~/.mozilla profile before or create another profile...

Then give your idea to the appropriate persons (people) on what they could have done (while respecting the free contract of some and the copyright of others)
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=354622

I'll have a look at swiftfox, dose it work with firefox extensions? but I'd still like to know how to fix firefox.

About swift-fox, what should I add to my APT sources.list? I want the one syncronised with etch but I can't set it to either "etch" or "testing"

As for the name debate: the only persion who's blowing it out of proportion are those being hard on the debian community, They just changed a name so they could legally ship their own patches. Thats not a big deal.

For me, swiftfox converted the old profile and upgraded all of the extensions flawlessly.
It is really just Firefox 2.0 built with various optimizations and specific compiler flags for your CPU.
It may be, however, that some of your extensions have not yet been upgraded to work with Firefox 2.0...
Backup your profile, just to be sure...

Well, I just downloaded the .deb for my architecture and installed it with dpkg -i, but IIRC you should be able to put
in your sources.list and then install the "unstable" package into your Etch with e.g. apt-get install swiftfox-xp/unstable or however it works in your package manager of choice.

(Since I am not a political person and have not followed the debate, I won't say anything about that renaming issue, I find it pretty sad that two fractions which basically share the same ideals when it comes to free software cannot agree. IANAL, but couldn't Debianjust put Firefox into non-free and all would be happy...?)

Thanks for the info Fnord

As for putting it into non-free, that would mean that debian could not have firefox installed by default. And that people would need to enable non-free just for it. Not quite "all would be happy"