Mozilla to Improve Firefox Memory Performance by 30%

[amk-aka-Phantom]

Oh, please do it. Improve it. I mean, my main desktop doesn't care whether FF takes 300MB or RAM or 3000, but my netbook only has 1 GB of RAM and if I use FF, all other work slows down... That's like the main con of FF, all other stuff is good - keep it up!

 

[therabiddeer]

Sounds great to me, though I wonder why its only 30% improvement. 14 tabs open and I am using 900MB of memory for FF and another 665MB of memory for the plugin container. The only reason I updated to FF 4/5 is because of the promise of a single tab crashing instead of everything, but the memory usage between 3 and 4 seems enormous to me.

 

[digiex]

Firefox user here, "Just Make It Happen"

 

[amigafan]

MemShrink project? But that's just a hack - it flushes data in RAM to virtual memory, it's like "solving" high memory usage by pushing the excess data under the carpet.

 

[Guest]

As of August 16th, or shortly after, Firefox 6 will be released on the stable channel, 7 will move into the Beta Channel and 8 will move into the Aurora channel. If you can't wait for 7 to be released in the stable channel then download it now: http/www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/

Remember, just because it's not in the stable channel, doesn't mean it isn't available.

One thing that you have to remember with the memory consumption on Firefox is that these improvements affect Firefox, they do NOT affect add-ons.

So, if you're sat there using Firefox 4 with 20 different add-ons installed, moaning about the amount of memory that is used, try installing Firefox Aurora 7 today, with no add-ons and then seeing how much faster it is. It will blow you away.

 

[bv90andy]

I don't know why everyone is/was hating on Firefox for its memory usage, I recently switched to Opera just so I can try it again, and after 1 hour of youtube and toms it's consuming 600Mb of ram (LoL) FF was using at most 300. So I have win7 and a browser open and I'm using 2 gb of ram... I was starting to regret that I bought 4 gigs coz most games don't use them, but now opera is.

 

[verbalizer]

just release 7 now and skip 6....

 

[johnsmithhatesVLC]

aurora seems pretty stable to me

 

[doorspawn]

Two things I'd love.
1: Some way of showing a given tab or addon's memory usage. (You can tell what the offenders are).
2: "Hibernating" tabs or windows. Basically, ensuring the whole tab is stored in (locked) cache, then removing its resources from memory until requested. Similar to offline mode.

 

[11796pcs]

I'm still using 3.6. Should I upgrade? Right now with 1 GB of RAM on Ubuntu it runs fine, but from what I hear 4/5 seem like they might put my RAM usage over the edge. Help anyone?

 

[gm0n3y]

I've been using Chrome mostly for the past year or so but it is even worse on memory than Firefox. I really wish that Google would do something about it.

 

[techguy378]

[citation][nom]Thunderfox[/nom]For christs sake, it would be nice if this site worked right. Maybe divert some of the people from the localization teams to fix things like this?[/citation]
I'm glad I'm not using Firefox...

 

[Guest]

> 1: Some way of showing a given tab or addon's memory usage. (You can tell what the offenders are).
Firefox 7 and above has "about:memory" page. But note that addons can increase reported memory per tab - both in FF and Chromium. As fo add-ons, there really can't be a meaningful measurement.

 

[Guest]

It’s nice to see how in benchmarks firefox becomes faster and faster (in a couple of years probably we will need atomic clocks precision to measure it). Yet firefox becomes slower and slower on our computers. Looking forward for some more intelligent computers that will be able to understand the benchmark figures and run faster.