[removed] should I worry about memory leaks in 2011?

Question

The topic of memory leaks in JavaScript is not brought up often. However, I stumbled upon this article, written in 2007. The authors state:

Internet Explo

Answer 1

Yes, memory leaks are definitely a problem in JavaScript, since circular references are indeed possible. A very common source of memory leaks is the use of closures. As an example, consider:

var outerFunction = function(param1, param2, param3) {
     var innerFunction = function() {};
     return innerFunction;
};

It is possible for the above to leak the parameters, since innerFunction holds a reference to the scope in which it was constructed, which includes the parameters to that frame.

While it is easy for these sorts of things to go unnoticed on many desktop computers, where there is plenty of RAM, this is actually something that can be very obvious on devices with limited RAM (e.g. a mobile phone or a set top box). As an anecdotal example, a couple websites that shall remain unnamed used to crash on me quite frequently when visited from my TV, which has very limited RAM.

Note that these problems are with the JavaScript code written by web developers. Memory leaks in the underlying JavaScript interpreters, while possible, are far less of an issue, and isn't something that web developers can reasonably concern themselves about, since that's the job of the browser writers.