Mozilla on Wednesday (Manila time) released a "leaner and faster" version of its Firefox browser, claiming to use up to 50 percent less memory than in previous versions. In a blog post, Mozilla said this means Firefox will now be snappier, more responsive, and suffer fewer pauses. "It also means that Firefox is less likely to crash or abort due to running out of memory," it said. Mozilla said the benefits will be felt most in activities such as:
keeping Firefox open for a long time; having many tabs, including those with many images, open at once; viewing web pages with large amounts of text; using Firefox on Microsoft Windows; using Firefox at the same time as other programs that use much memory. The memory reduction stemmed from the "MemShrink" effort, which aimed to improve Firefox’s speed and stability by reducing memory usage. Mozilla said it conducted endurance tests of development versions of Firefox, repeatedly opening and closing pages from 100 widely used websites in 30 tabs. It said Firefox 6, had a peak resident memory usage of 2,028 MB and a final resident usage was 669 MB. For Firefox 7, the peak usage was 1,851 MB (an 8.7-percent reduction) and the final usage was 321 MB (a 52-percent reduction). "This means that users should see Firefox 7 using less memory than earlier versions — often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less — though the improvements will depend on the exact workload. Indeed, we have had lots of feedback from early users that the latest Firefox update feels faster, is more responsive, has fewer pauses, and is generally more pleasant to use than previous versions," it said. A separate article on tech site Mashable said most of the changes in Firefox 7 compared to Firefox 6 were under the hood. It said Firefox 7 also improved its support for cutting-edge web technologies, including hardware-accelerated Canvas for HTML5 animations. But it said that for Mac users, Firefox 7 is still no match for Google Chrome, at least when it comes to memory usage. "Firefox has historically had better Windows performance, especially when it comes to memory usage, and we expect those are the users that will really see the benefits," it said. Another article on tech site PC Magazine said the newest release addresses the problem of 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," it said. But it said a quick comparison test between Firefox 6 and 7 showed an improvement: The older version took 8 seconds to start, while version 7 improved that to 5 seconds. Still, this lagged behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9’s 2.5 seconds and Chrome 13’s 4.2 seconds. Meanwhile, 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," it said. It also noted a minor interface tweak where the address bar now dispenses with the “http://" when displaying webpage URLs. — RSJ, GMA News 
GMA Brandtalk
Tracking
Archives
