Firefox 12 STILL consumes too much memory and periodically stalls

Question

1. This has gone on actually since at least Firefox 8 for many of us. With Windows 7 32 or 64bit, AND we are told OTHER OS's as well, Firefox 12 IS consuming too much memory!
When FF 12 memory consumption "hits" 800MB on a 8 GB machine, and continues to slowly climb, FF 12 has code or other problems.
2. ALSO, Firefox 12 under many circumstances, is slowing to a crawl, especially in opening windows and tabs.
NOTHING we do, inspect with memory tools, etc. seems to point to any "culprits" or guide the way to researching and potentially solving these problems...and they ARE problems within Firefox 12, and likely earlier versions.
TIME TO CLEAR THE AIR?
These are problems being seen by others, with or without any (totally blanked out/disabled) Add-On's and even most Plug-In's being disabled or removed, both for testing the problems sen in FF 12.
There IS a problem, or more than one, here, and it's not isolated or "just refer to this checklist" solvable.
There's problems, perhaps memory leaks and other agenda IN THE CODE.
We users need to stop being poo-poo'ed and "pampered" by needless communications that do nothing to truly address the problems.

Answer 1

I encountered this after the memory leak was mentioned as pat of a slowdown issue with an add-on that has been in use as long as I've been using Firefox (All-in one sidebar -AIOS). After a relatively short length of time under both Firefox 11 and 12 it starts to slow down. Sub menus take more than a second to show up when the parent menu is clicked, links take more than a second to activate, pages don't load as quickly. (I have a 30Mbps downstream internet connection that I test regularly, and consistently shows between 25 and 30MBps speeds from multiple sites throughout the US. It's NOT my download speed.)
In looking for explanations I saw at least one mention of a memory Leak.
So I decided to test this for myself. I first removed AIOS, then re-started Firefox and just left it running. I did nothing except minimize and restore it a few times. About an hour later the memory used by FF had gone from a reasonable 42K or so, to over 200K.
I tested again after uninstalling ALL my add-ons and plug ins. The same thing happened again.
This is NOT simply high memory use. Which I interpret as a particular tasks or process using more memory than it maybe should.
This is quite clearly a memory leak. Nothing was being executed, nothing was running with Firefox, and no pages were loaded during this time. But he use memory just steadily grew.
This is clearly a new issues since I did NOT have this problem when I was using Firefox 8. If I can find an install of that I'm going back to it.
If not I'll settle for the ESR mentioned here. If nothing else it seems to have a slower leak.
I never did like the new version number / rapid release schedule. Mostly because growing version numbers at that rate made no real sense to me as a developer myself. But also because speed of release for new features should not be the target but quality. I think we can see that this has clearly fallen by the wayside.
I only wish I thought there was a viable alternative.