I have found this on all browsers tested - IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari on Window sand Safari on Apple.
Allegedly, a browser refresh, back button or forward link should dump the browser nodes and javascript variables and objects, etc. This appears to not be the case for WebGL. I first noticed it when developing a complex WebGL application that requires about 100MB to 200MB of memory. While developing, I have to do a lot of refreshes and my computer would start to slow down and freeze after 5-10 refreshes.
After some research I realized that this shouldn't be. The accepted solution out of a memory leak is to refresh the page which should release all javascript objects and variables and dom nodes. But take a look at the following images:
So what's the deal here? On small apps it isn't noticed, but for large WebGL apps like mine (orbitingeden.com) this is a real issue and my users are going to think the software is even more of a resource hog than it really is. The following image shows these refreshes gobbling up all of my available memory, so garbage collection is not working and / or JS and DOM objects are not being released:
(source: orbitingeden.com)
Does someone know of a trick to force the browser to do a true dump of memory? Why is all the documentation out there wrong?