Mozilla releases Firefox 7 claiming improved memory usage

SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Mozilla has released Firefox 7 claiming it incorporates significant improvements for reducing memory usage.

Mozilla's Firefox web browser has been put on a rapid release schedule that has resulted in Firefox 4, 5, 6 and now 7 being released within six months. Firefox 7 however looks at something far more important than page rendering speed and the location of tabs, it aims to tackle memory usage.

For the best part of a decade the Achilles heel of Mozilla's Firefox has been its memory usage, with widespread reports of memory leaks. Earlier this year Mozilla said it discovered that increasing the frequency of the garbage collection resulted in significant decreases in memory usage, and that it planned to incorporate its new memory management techniques in Firefox 7.

Mozilla has made memory management its top feature in Firefox 7 - it is the first bullet point on the release notes - but the question is, how much of an improvement is there? According to Mozilla's experiments, Firefox 7 delivers a 10 to 20 per cent decrease in average resident memory usage from Firefox 6. Encouragingly, Firefox 8 shows further memory improvements, and it's due out later this year.

Mozilla has also updated the resource metrics Firefox collects if the user enables telemetry. Now the outfit can see memory usage, CPU core count, cycle collection times and startup speed. Mozilla assures its users that there is no personally identifiable data being sent and all data is sent via SSL.

As expected Mozilla has also released Firefox 7 for Android and its email client, Thunderbird 7.

If Mozilla can finally curb Firefox's hunger for memory in Firefox 7 and 8, and with the significant improvements in rendering and Javascript performance it has shown since Firefox 4, it could finally start to counter the rapid take-up of Google's Chrome. µ