Firefox 7 to use as much as 50% less memory

[nsane.forums]

Earlier this year, Mozilla decided to take a new and interesting approach to developing its Firefox web browser. Instead of waiting several months or even a year between versions, we are now seeing major new versions of the Firefox browser being released within weeks of each other. Indeed Firefox 6 is currently scheduled for release sometime this week. But Mozilla's creators are already working on the following version, Firefox 7.

In a blog post written by Nicholas Nethercote, one of Mozilla's programmers, he claims that Firefox 7 will have a solution that many users of the web browser will be happy to hear. He says, "Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20 (percent) to 30 (percent) less, and sometimes as much as 50 {percent) 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."

That's a massive improvement over Firefox 6 which technically hasn't even been officially released. Nethercote points out, "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." He credits the improvements in part to MemShink, a new effort by Mozllla designed specifically to decrease Firefox's memory usage and this may just be just the beginning. He says, "... development versions of Firefox 8 already have even better memory usage, and I expect we'll continue to make further improvements as time goes on."

View: Original Article

[Bizarre™]

I have been using Firefox 8.0 Nightly for a while, and it stays at 500MB even if I keep it open for hours.

Regardless, I do not recommend it for daily use yet. It has been buggy ever since Mozilla implemented the tab animation.

[dMog]

I have been using Firefox 8.0 Nightly for a while, and it stays at 500MB even if I keep it open for hours.

Regardless, I do not recommend it for daily use yet. It has been buggy ever since Mozilla implemented the tab animation.

so what...they only have vesrion 5 out right now

[HX1]

You can kill the tab animation.. in about:config in fact it is in several versions of the browser as of now..

[Lucent]

I have been using Firefox 8.0 Nightly for a while, and it stays at 500MB even if I keep it open for hours.

Regardless, I do not recommend it for daily use yet. It has been buggy ever since Mozilla implemented the tab animation.

Strange, I've had only one crash with Nightly.

Maybe you should check if it's browser's or plugins' fault.

In any case, at the moment Nightly with 4 tabs eats around 250 MB of RAM, in my opinion it's still too resource-expensive, don't you think?

[Kojootti]

You can kill the tab animation.. in about:config in fact it is in several versions of the browser as of now..

Yes,the preference name is: browser.tabs.animate

Edit: While talking about Firefox and it's memory leaks,take a look at this interesting Freeware app

from Rizone,called FireMin...

http://www.rizonesoft.com/2011/firemin/

One of the biggest “improvements” that Mozilla claims is improved memory usage, in particular, the vanquishing of memory leaks. 
If you thought it was too good to be true you were right. Firefox still uses a lot of memory – way too much memory for a web browser.

We like keeping our apps running for a few days (that’s just the way we roll) and because of this Firefox was using over ~800MB 
of memory after about 3 days. It’s quite normal for Firefox to be sucking up ~100MB of memory right off the bat 
(in a memory leak you’ll see the memory usage keep increasing the longer the browser is open/in-use).

Rather than complaining about it, we decided to try and fix it. 
Enter Rizone Firemin (Formerly Firefox Plumber); simply put; it will eliminate most memory leaks in Firefox. 
All we did was tweaked our memory optimization engine a little and applied it to Firefox and most memory leaks was gone. 
To use Firemin; you will need to unzip firemin.zip and double click on Firemin.exe and let it babysit Firefox. 
You expected it to be more complicated, we are truly sorry to disappoint you.

[Bizarre™]

@dMog:

I knew that Mozilla will release 6.0 Final after Beta 5.

I just didn't pay too much attention to it since I'm using nightly builds.

@HX1:

I'm using Tab Mix Plus, so there's no need for me to disable that preference.

Members from TMP forum came up with a temporary fix for the tab animation.

The fix will have to do until onemen decides to release a new working dev.

@Lucent:

I actually have 60 tabs most of the time, kept open for hours, and it just stays at 500MB.

At the very least, Mozilla fixed the CPU intensive AOM bug when it was still at 6.0 nightly.