Firebug 1.3 Memory Problems

I really can’t imagine doing serious JavaScript development and DOM manipulation without the help of Firebug, however since installing version 1.3 – I’m using Firefox 3.0.5 on Windows XP – I noticed that the amount of memory it causes the browser to eat up is massive and continuously increasing.

Check out this screengrab of my Task Manager showing the Firefox browser eating up 1.4 Gigs of RAM only seconds after I opened it.  All I did was go to the MLB.com’s video page and only a single tab in Firefox is open:

Task Manager - Firefox Memory Usag

I’ve seen this on multiple computers with the same versions of Firefox/Firebug, and while a few others have reported similar issues, I don’t think I’ve heard of a report of such an extreme case and even less fortunately, no report of the root cause nor a forthcoming fix.

For the time being, I’m reverting to Firebug version 1.2.1 which is much less memory-hungry.  I suggest you do the same.