Mozilla's Firefox 7, slated to ship in late September, will be significantly faster because of work done plugging the browser's memory leaks, a company developer says.
Mozilla developer Nicholas Nethercote credited the "MemShrink" project for closing memory bugs in the browser and producing a faster Firefox. MemShrink kicked off two months ago.
"Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4), often 20% to 30% less and sometimes as much as 50% less," Nethercote said. "This means that Firefox 7 is faster (sometimes drastically so) and less likely to crash, particularly if you have many websites open at once and/or keep Firefox running for a long time between restarts."
Firefox has long been criticised for using large amounts of RAM and for not releasing memory when tabs are closed, practices that can degrade the browser's performance or in extreme cases cause it to crash or lock up.
Mozilla has tried to stop the leaks before. In 2008, a pair of company engineers claimed that work done on the under construction Firefox 3 had paid off, with improved memory handling compared to earlier versions and rivals.
Nethercote acknowledged Firefox's reputation as a "memory hog," and noted that some versions had used memory more efficiently than others, applauding Firefox 3, 3.5 and 3.6.
Nethercote cited tests that Mozilla and others had conducted with Firefox 7 that showed it used less memory than its predecessors and released unused memory more reliably when tabs were closed or the browser went idle.
"The reduced memory usage should also result in fewer crashes and aborts on Windows, where Firefox is built as a 32-bit application and so is typically restricted to only 2GB of virtual memory," Nethercote said.
Firefox 7 is currently in the "Aurora" channel, and will shift to a more reliable beta build on or shortly after next Tuesday, August 16. If Mozilla maintains its rapid release schedule, which results in a new edition every six weeks, the final version of Firefox 7 will ship September 27.
Firefox 7 can be downloaded from the Mozilla website.