Memory leaks in javascript closures

Quote from Google JavaScript style guide :

The ability to create closures is the most useful and often overlooked feature of JS.

However, one thing needs to be kept in mind: a closure stores a pointer to the context that it closes. As a result, attaching a closure to a DOM element can cause cyclic dependency and, therefore, memory leakage. For example, in the following piece of code:
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function foo(element, a, b) { element.onclick = function() { /*  a  b */ }; } 

a closure stores a pointer to element , a and b even if it never uses element . And since element also stores a pointer to the closure, it turns out a cycle that will never be cleaned by the garbage collector.

In such cases, the code should be structured as follows:

 function foo(element, a, b) { element.onclick = bar(a, b); } function bar(a, b) { return function() { /*  a  b */ } } 

It seems that at the moment this is the most common practical example of a memory leak in JavaScript.