Firefox 15 will be released tomorrow, and it features a fantastic change that prevents most memory leaks in add-ons, which have been a big problem for a long time.
However, recently we discovered that the change is causing some GreaseMonkey scripts to leak badly. The scripts we know that leak are “YousableTubeFix” and “Textarea backup with expiry”, but others might have the same problem. Fortunately, Anthony Lieuallen and Kyle Huey worked together to fix the problem, and version 1.0 of GreaseMonkey contains the fix. If you have GreaseMonkey installed you can open the Add-ons Manager to see which version you have. If it’s older than 1.0 (e.g. 0.9.22), you can update by visiting the GreaseMonkey page and clicking on the big green “Add to Firefox” button.
This is the only add-on we know that is adversely affected by the change in Firefox 15. Hopefully we won’t find any more!
4 replies on “Update to GreaseMonkey 1.0 to avoid leaks in Firefox 15”
Is this fix specific to FF15, or will Greasemonkey 1.0 also be beneficial to users on ESR who will not get the Hueyfix?
It’s specific to FF15, so users of the current ESR release won’t be affected.
It is usually recommended to keep all add-ons updated. But reading the recent bug reporting reviews for GreaseMonkey on addons.mozilla.org, ESR users may want to wait for a bit later version (as they can do it without the negative effect of Hueyfix), like 1.0.1.
I hope that with Firefox now automatically killing the memory leaking open references to the DOM, developers don’t get too lazy trying to maintain their code properly. This could lead to a mentality of “oh firefox will fix my loose ends”.
I wish Firefox would begin collecting stats on these plugins to find the worst offenders, and those stats published to the plugin’s page. Each plugin could then be given a “memory management score” (in addition to their current star rating) right there for everyone to see.
Would also be nice if this data were broken out on our “about:memory” page