(These improvements are available earlier to users on the Aurora and Beta channels.) Firefox 7 is the first release to benefit from MemShrink’s successes, and the benefits are significant. A great deal of progress has been made in only 7 weeks, and thanks to Firefox’s new rapid release cycle, each improvement made will make its way into a final release in only 12–18 weeks. But Firefox 4 regressed again, partly due to a large number of new features (not all of which were maximally efficient in their first iteration), and partly due to some over-aggressive tuning of heuristics relating to JavaScript garbage collection and image decoding.Īs a result, Mozilla engineers started an effort called MemShrink, the aim of which is to improve Firefox’s speed and stability by reducing its memory usage. For example, Firefox 2 was quite bad, but Firefox 3, 3.5 and 3.6 were substantially better. Backgroundįirefox has a reputation for being a memory hog, and the efficiency with which it uses memory has varied over the years. 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. In particular, Firefox 7’s memory usage will stay steady if you leave it running overnight, and it will free up more memory when you close many tabs. Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less.
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