Firefox 7 to Use 20-50% Less Memory

Aug 24, 2011 by Matt | Posted in Software & Scripts 3 Comments

Mozilla engineers have began and effort known as “MemShrink” to reduce Firefox’s rather large memory footprint, with the changes being made in Firefox 7. (I still haven’t quite figured out Mozilla’s new version numbering scheme, and Firefox 5 is the current release…)

In short:

Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less. 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.

Also, there are already some early mock-ups of what the UI in Firefox 8 might look like.

Firefox 7 is lean and fast [Nicholas Nethercote]

  • jagadish

    Just want to point out 6 is the current version of FireFox.

    • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

      I wrote this a few days before it was released. (I write posts in advance and schedule them for later publication.) Sneaky Mozilla. :)

  • Joden

    FireFox7, aka FinalFantasy7, will have a huge step forward dealing with memory. FF6 doesn’t have such nice awaited features. I’ll skip #6. During this time I will keep using chrome+Avant browser.