Wonderful, so instead people's completely valid comments are dropped without warning?

I'm not going to justify a blogger's need to install and use anti-spam software. In this particular case, your comment was shuffled to the spam queue because you included a number of links. I saw it there and authorized it, albeit hours after it was posted.

Mark Rowe said on February 28, 2007:

In particular, I can recall three big changes in the last six weeks that will reduce memory footprint.

Good. That's all I was looking for - a statement re: the memory footprint. Contrary to your belief, I don't use my blog to spread FUD - I use it to find answers and get to the bottom of things. By posting, I've drawn you (and others) here, and anyone reading the comments becomes informed.

Case closed: Leopard's Safari may indeed use less RAM. Thank you.

Mark Rowe said on February 28, 2007:

WebKit was very aggressive in caching pages in memory, and could potentially cache up to sixteen pages per tab in some situations. This has been scaled back to a slightly more reasonable limit.

Indeed, that sounds excessive.

More likely it's the combination of Bad Behavior and/or Akismet. I rarely see spam that needs moderated anymore, and Bad Behavior blocks a lot of people before they reach a point where I get to see it (though it usually gives an error message and a code, I believe).

Wonderful, so instead people's completely valid comments are dropped without warning?

The gist of my comment is that the latest development versions of WebKit are very different from the currently shipping version. The version shipping with Mac OS X is nearly two years old, and many hundreds of bugs have been fixed. In particular, I can recall three big changes in the last six weeks that will reduce memory footprint. One fixes a leak which occurs in particular cases with the removeEventListener function, a second addresses a reference cycle than can occur when futzing with object prototypes in a certain manner, and another more intelligently manages the memory used when a plugin requests resources. There is also the change in in-memory caching that several people have mentioned: WebKit was very aggressive in caching pages in memory, and could potentially cache up to sixteen pages per tab in some situations. This has been scaled back to a slightly more reasonable limit.

Erik J. Barzeski said on February 28, 2007:

As to "it's open source," sure. But until that source is running on the final version of Leopard with whatever "secrets" are still being kept by the mother ship, it's still all speculation.

It's all speculation as to the specific revision of WebKit that will make its way into Leopard, but I highly doubt that Apple is going to go back through and pull out half of the fixes that have been made over the last two years. Yes, I admit that talking about development builds of WebKit is a bit annoying given that they're not usable by the average person, but there is good evidence to suggest that whatever version of WebKit ends up in Leopard will not differ too markedly from the version of WebKit currently available via the nightly builds. As such, they are a good defence against the FUD you seem to be trying to spread.

I'll second Mark's comment. Background CPU usage and memory use have nothing to do with each other.

I never said they did, Eric.

TheSpecialOne said on February 28, 2007:

Mark, you'll find quite a few comments get moderated around here. Of course the tubes simply could have been full or leaky as well.

More likely it's the combination of Bad Behavior and/or Akismet. I rarely see spam that needs moderated anymore, and Bad Behavior blocks a lot of people before they reach a point where I get to see it (though it usually gives an error message and a code, I believe).

As to "it's open source," sure. But until that source is running on the final version of Leopard with whatever "secrets" are still being kept by the mother ship, it's still all speculation.

I posted a followup comment here an hour or so ago, but it appears to have been eaten? What's up with that?

Mark, you'll find quite a few comments get moderated around here. Of course the tubes simply could have been full or leaky as well.

Of course, I'm not trying to use (say) Aperture while doing that

Overall I really fail to see why anyone would try to guess based on blog posts when it's an open source project, with every commit logged and nightly builds available...