Since its first release back in 2004 Firefox has been my web browser of choice. It was the first browser to give Microsoft some serious competition and soon took over as the better choice for those in the know.
Google Chrome has come along since and injected a lot of speed into browsing the web, and Firefox has duly responded and even outperforms it easily in some tasks, but it does have one niggling problem that users regular complain about: memory use and memory leaks.
If you leave Firefox running for any length of time its memory footprint seems to keep increasing. This can escalate to the point where it stops responding and there’s nothing to do but restart the browser. Personally, I’ve seen this problem have less of an impact during my daily usage since moving to Firefox 5, but it’s still there.
Mozilla knows this problem exists and aims to fix it. By the time we see Firefox 7 available for download it will use as much as 50% less memory than any version that has gone before, as well as having those problematic memory leaks fixed.
Posting on his personal blog, Mozilla developer Nicholas Nethercote has stated that Firefox 7 will be noticeably faster. You will be able to leave it running overnight without issue, and closing tabs will free up memory. The reason for this is a new Mozilla project called MemShrink.
MemShrink is an internal effort that focuses on improving Firefox’s speed, stability, and perception. Speed will come in the form of less paging and less pressure on the cache. By sorting out the paging the stability will improve due to fewer out of memory crashes. The perception improvement comes from a combination of the two other goals of MemShrink: fewer crashes and better performance takes the perception of the browser up.
Endurance testing carried out at Mozilla using synthetic tests has already proved that MemShrink is going to mean significant savings in memory use as the following charts show:
Google Chrome has come along since and injected a lot of speed into browsing the web, and Firefox has duly responded and even outperforms it easily in some tasks, but it does have one niggling problem that users regular complain about: memory use and memory leaks.
If you leave Firefox running for any length of time its memory footprint seems to keep increasing. This can escalate to the point where it stops responding and there’s nothing to do but restart the browser. Personally, I’ve seen this problem have less of an impact during my daily usage since moving to Firefox 5, but it’s still there.
Mozilla knows this problem exists and aims to fix it. By the time we see Firefox 7 available for download it will use as much as 50% less memory than any version that has gone before, as well as having those problematic memory leaks fixed.
Posting on his personal blog, Mozilla developer Nicholas Nethercote has stated that Firefox 7 will be noticeably faster. You will be able to leave it running overnight without issue, and closing tabs will free up memory. The reason for this is a new Mozilla project called MemShrink.
MemShrink is an internal effort that focuses on improving Firefox’s speed, stability, and perception. Speed will come in the form of less paging and less pressure on the cache. By sorting out the paging the stability will improve due to fewer out of memory crashes. The perception improvement comes from a combination of the two other goals of MemShrink: fewer crashes and better performance takes the perception of the browser up.
Endurance testing carried out at Mozilla using synthetic tests has already proved that MemShrink is going to mean significant savings in memory use as the following charts show:
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