I wish you all a belated merry Christmas and a really happy, healthy and successful new year 2012.

Whoa! There is a lot to be said of the browser that’s eating up 520MB of RAM, however, it could as well be all the tabs and all plugins I am using. So, I closed all tabs in one instance which led me to a awesome save of 10MB. Closed the second instance and all but one tab in first instance got me yet another 10MB memory save now marking Firefox as a 500MB process for handling one single browser tab. After another hour of doing nothing with the browser, it dropped to 490MB. Nice.

This looked a lot like a memory leak or someone trusting garbage collector just a bit too much. Nah, it must have been all my plugins (5 in reality: FireBug, Web Developer, FireGestures, TabMix Plus and Live HTTP Headers.  So, I turned them off. Starting Firefox without any plugins. Opening browser with a blank start page took 69MB of RAM. Just loading arstechnica.com caused it to take yet another 20MB. Now, one would think that that was it: 89MB for 1 tab with a website opened. Nope. Reload the same site and it suddenly takes 95MB of RAM and stagnating. So, the difference of 6MB on a page reload and I was pretty sure garbage collector won’t clean this up. Non-the-less, I decided to leave PC working overnight with just this one page loaded.

Results next morning were staggering. And not in a good way. In the morning, the same browser window with same page that never reloaded consumed 150MB of RAM! That is a huge memory leak of 70MB in some 6 hours.

Now this got me thinking. I last seen such memory leak in Firefox 3 early releases. And that one got fixed by a 3.2 version. But that was when Mozilla was sticking to old release cycle. These days, release cycle is reduced to 8 weeks. Compared to most others, I fail to agree with this policy and this memory leak is the precise reason why. If you are releasing a new version every 8 weeks, there is not enough time to clean up bugs. And that can mean only one thing. That old bugs are transported to newer versions.

Now, I bet that to some marketing guy, the 8 weeks deadline seemed a good idea. After all, every 8 weeks, we get a discussion if it was really necessary to create a new version for a browser with less changes than a 3.x edition used to have. And talk is good. Right? Wrong. Bad publicity kills reputation, which kills market share, which can kill a product and I am seriously wondering if Mozilla is aware of that.

Lotus Notes development will now be put aside. My expertise and knowledge in C++ and .NET development will be challenged and I look forward to it.

What does this mean for this blog? This blog was meant to be a Lotus Notes tips & tricks repository. Even in the past that was about 50% of my posts. In the future, Lotus Notes tips & tricks will probably drop significantly. They will be replaced by .NET tips and experiences I gain in my further escapades.

This concludes my posts for this year and see you all in next one.

Now to what every geek likes. Statistics. But not more than just enough to wet your nose.

In past year, more than 3300 of you decided to read what was posted here. And some of you even returned for more. Way above my expectations, to be quite honest. Most of you were from USA (1.2K), followed by UK, Germany, Slovenia and India.

FireFox was most used browser (51%), even thought some of you used IE (38%). Which is a bit different from world stats. Not that I mind.

Most read articles would be (in order of views): Exporting form into DXL, Microsoft Expression Superview Beta, Design patterns series and a rant about Notes rendering engine. Most surprising is high placement of Microsoft thingy and on blog that focuses on Lotus technology. The fact that DXL is still such a popular topic is not that surprising, as documentation and Notes help are still too vague about that. Thankfully now, there are examples included. When I started using DXL for exporting documents to Wiki and Atom format, that was still not the case.

Unfortunately, my work orientation is lately changing to technologies not connected to Lotus. I do hope I will be able to keep up in the future.

Now, I need to get back to work. Then, later today, a decent meal and couple pints of beer. Hopefully.

Not a good idea. I don’t know, when was the last time, someone at IBM took a look at their rendering engine, but this just isn’t it. Unordered lists don’t close, leading to a total mess of your layout. On numerous occasions, a div tag marked as pass through text got put to the bottom of contents and not at the spot where it was in the body field, leading to some more confusion. And what killed it for me was a sudden br tag flood in the HTML for no apparent reason. All 6 of them were gone when text was put in the same line as pass through text and appeared right after I put the text back in new line. And all of this appeared randomly, which amused me for a while.

So, I guess it is no wonder, why there are so many CMS application in Notes, where content needs to be entered as HTML. However, in my experience, you as a developer or admin of such system can be glad if a content editor knows how to use Lotus Notes.