Mozilla's Memory Issue solved

Mozilla’s 6-week release cycle is a bold new step that ensures frequent release of updates, and users will now get the new features faster than ever. The latest stable release of Firefox is a big leap forward for Mozilla as it solves the oldest, biggest and probably one of the most irritating  of bugs in the browser, the memory bug.

As posted on Mozilla’s support forum Mozillazine, “Firefox caches objects for future use. In addition, memory becomes fragmented as memory is repeatedly allocated and de-allocated. This general increase is normal.[1]” In other words, Firefox can’t efficiently return the memory it allocates when it’s no longer needed by it.

Those who keep 10/15+ tabs open at the same time will know how irritating it gets when the system memory gets sloppy. Stream two videos at the same time on youtube while checking updates on Facebook or browsing picture galleries, and everything freezes up. Browser crashes and unresponsive video drivers were a common occurence in Firefox 5 and older. There were hacks in the about:config page to solve this issue but they weren’t guaranteed to work, definitely not up to the level we needed it to work. They weren’t much help to me at least.

Firefox 5 was an even bigger memory hog than the previous releases. Even the Memoryfox Addon (here) couldn’t do much. (Firefox 6 had buttons added in the about:memory page to do the memory flushing.)

But Firefox developers have finally taken the matter seriously and Mozilla claims that in Firefox 7 and onwards the memory leakage problem will  be solved.

I’ve been using the browser (Firefox 7) for a week now and it does feel faster than Firefox 5 or 6.  Memory leakage, not gone but considerably reduced as memory usage by Firefox 7 is much less after long use compared to Firefox 5. Firefox 8, which is still in beta, doesn’t add anything more to memory management compared to Firefox 7, but then again, it has more than a month left for its scheduled release.

Also, at the time of writing of this article, both the Aurora and the Nightly builds of Firefox, feel a lot faster. Try pages with lots of graphics, pictures, videos and lots of different colors, open on 10 or more tabs, and it still has no problems while switching between tabs. Personally I’ve had no problems switching between 20 tabs, most of them full of pictures, while logged on to all three of Facebook, twitter and google+ (doing all this would either cause your display to freeze or your browser to crash on Firefox 5). Many users have said that Firefox 7 is just as good with 40+ tabs as well. With the developments that we see in these beta releases and considering the all that time still left for the final release of Firefox 8, 9 and 10 (For now these are the beta, aurora and nightly builds until their stable versions are out. You can download them from from here and here), it is certain that these new versions do have something to offer. You can learn more about these builds here.