Firefox 7 Released With Better Memory Management

[err0r]

One of the more common complaints I've heard about Firefox over the last few years has been about its gluttonous use of system RAM. Firefox 7, released today, addresses this issue head on, with a MemShrink project that reduces memory use by 20 to 50 percent, according to Mozilla, the non-profit organization that develops Firefox. This results in both faster performance and a lower likelihood of crashing. Version 7 also adds some new developer tools, more graphics hardware acceleration, and an opt-in reporting tool to let Mozilla know about usage problems.

 

Mozilla announced the new version in a post on its blog titled, "Mozilla Firefox Significantly Reduces Memory Use to Make Web Browsing Faster". At the same time, the Android mobile version of Firefox was announced, which now lets users copy and paste from websites to destinations outside the browser, such as e-mails and SMS messages.

 

The new release also addresses my biggest complaint: startup time. Firefox has taken longer to start running than any competing browser for years. It's particularly a problem for a cold start: when you first run the app after a reboot. In a quick comparison test between Firefox 6 and 7, I found that there was indeed an improvement: The older version took 8 seconds to start, while version 7 improved that to 5 seconds. This still, however, lagged behind Internet Explorer 9's 2.5 seconds and Chrome 13's 4.2 seconds on my 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo with 3GB of RAM.

 

Mozilla claims that not only has startup speed improved, but also tab opening, menus and buttons on websites. It also claims that "Heavy Internet users will enjoy enhanced performance when lots of tabs are open and during long Web browsing sessions that last hours or even days."

 

Firefox 7 also brings speed to some HTML5 content by using the computer's graphics hardware to accelerate Canvas, a specification for screen drawing used by Web animations and games such as Angry Birds and Runfield, a sample HTML5 game Mozilla cited in the blog post. Hardware acceleration was first popularized as a browser feature by Microsoft when introducing Internet Explorer 9, which runs Runfield quickly, too, thanks to its hardware acceleration.

 

Also new is support for the W3C Internet standards body's Navigation Timing spec, which lets developers to test their page's load speed. With this support the Web developer can remotely measure his site's performance and optimize it for different user profiles.

 

Firefox 7 also adds an opt-in Telemetry tool that sends anonymous browser performance data to Mozilla so that it can improve future versions of the browser. The tool abides by Mozilla's Privacy Principles, and Mozilla claims it's secure as well. Telemetry is an add-on that users can install and remove at will.

 

Finally, there is one minor interface tweak that astute users may notice: The browser's address bar now dispenses with the "http://" when displaying webpage URLs. It's yet one more instance of Firefox emulating Google's Chrome browser, which has behaved this way for over a year.

 

Users of Firefox 6 will automatically be prompted to update to version 7 upon restarting the program over the next few days. New users can head to the Firefox download page, where versions of the browser are available in over 60 languages for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Alternatively, they can check the Help/About menu, which will look for the new version and optionally install it.

 

Source: Michael Muchmore

[gillian]

much faster than chrome:)

 

[Chief]

Does seem a bit faster to me too.

[Fanfare]

Gilliam, you might want to check the update again, because it's supposed to show 7.0.1, not just 7.0.