I might just ditch Firefox because of this webpage. A fresh session of Ffx15 goes up to 1.5 GB memory usage, pushes everything into swap and brings my whole OS to a grinding halt until I kill it. In other words this link is basically a very effective DoS. In Chromium it works fine. Am I the only one having this problem?
(Edit: I have several Ffx addons running and no Chromium addons, so the comparison was unfair. Maybe I'll just ditch some of those addons...)
I doubt that the patch helps in this particular case as all images are present in the DOM, so Firefox will merrily load all of the images, independent of whether they are visible or not. This has been a longstanding architectural problem.
I use Firefox 15 on Ubuntu, with quite a lot of addons. I watched "top" whilst I opened the page, and I saw Firefox quickly consume 30% of my RAM (I have 8GB). Once the page finished loading, it dropped back down to 5%.
The page works fine for me, but I imagine it would suck if I had less RAM. I tried it in Chrome too and it never even got as high as 5% memory usage.
I'm willing to bet that the developers who made this page, and the managers who approved it, all have plenty of RAM in their machines.
I am using Firefox 15 on Windows XP. I had no problems whatsoever.
I opened up windows task manager, and watched the mem usage for firefox.exe. Before navigating to that webpage, it was using 150 MB of memory. I went to the webpage and scrolled down as expected, and saw the mem usage peak at around 430 MB when the page first loaded, then as I scrolled down and sat at the bottom of the page, it stabilized at around 300 MB.
After closing the tab and going back to leave this comment, firefox is back to about 150 MB of mem usage. I think there is a problem with your particular installation (or add-ons or drivers), not a general problem with Firefox itself.
FF 16 (Aurora channel), Windows 7 here: no noticeable issues. Memory usage showed about 350 MB, and that's not remarkably far from regular usage numbers anyway.
Memory usage jumped to about 2GB before the machine became totally unresponsive. I did something else for a few minutes while I waited for the kernel to kill anything using too much memory and get my machine back to a usable state.
Firefox 15 on Linux, I see 1.7-1.8G of memory use and the page is (unsurprisingly) significantly slower to load than in Chrome. It doesn't bring my OS to a halt because this machine has plenty of RAM, but clearly it's not good.
While that's not a great result for Firefox, I do think the people at Nissan who did that could have shown a little more restraint.
My Fx (15, on Vista) was using 700 MB with 20 tabs open, went up to 1GB with this page open, but there's no noticeable performance hit; the page scrolled smooth and snappy. It's probably your addons as you mention, most of us would benefit from periodic checking and removal of addons we no longer need.
I'm running FF 15 too, but I'm not seeing what you're seeing. 700MB working set with this page open, which drops to 650 (temporarily) if I close the page and do about:memory GC and CC.
(Mind you I have 24GB of memory on this machine. I wouldn't willingly choose to run Windows 7 on any less than 4GB.)
Which channel are you on? I'm running the latest beta and it works fine for me. If you're on stable then I can see how it would be causing you some issues, especially if you have FireBug installed.
(Edit: I have several Ffx addons running and no Chromium addons, so the comparison was unfair. Maybe I'll just ditch some of those addons...)