MSFT Fixes Memory Leaks in IE6
Hell must have frozen over or something. I don’t know if this just fixes certain kinds of leaks or all of them; explicit circular references in your code should still be avoided. Xopus, via Snook:
At Xopus we develop a pretty big (~50k lines) JavaScript application to edit XML documents through a WYSIWYG interface. With such a large application there’s a large risk of memory leaks. Indeed, this is what we’ve been experiencing in Internet Explorer 6. We’ve also seen a decrease in performance as memory usage increased. These leaks, however, do not occur in Internet Explorer 7. And, as of just 10 days ago, they no longer occur in IE6 on Windows XP.
On June 12th, Microsoft released security update MS07-033. Included in this update is the following:
General distribution release (GDR) fixes
A memory leak occurs in Internet Explorer 6 when you view a Web page that uses JScript scripting on a Windows XP-based computer (KB929874)And indeed, IE 6 on Windows XP no longer leaks memory, nor performance. This is great news for all JavaScript hackers, there’s no need to worry about memory leaks anymore!
The one cave-at is that this fix is only available for Windows XP. For Xopus this means we’ll still have to fix the leaks, since some of our clients are still running Windows 2000. Users who haven’t installed the latest security updates will also experience memory leaks in IE 6. In the end though, Microsoft fixed the memory leak issues in Internet Explorer, and I’m thankful for that.