Firefox 15 to fix memory leaks
Ryan Martin / 12 years ago
Memory leaking has been a thorn in the side of Mozilla’s Firefox for quite a while now. But the problem certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed at Mozilla as the next installment of Firefox, version 15, should come with fixes for popular memory leaking add ons.
A number of popular add ons have been optimised for Firefox 15, such as Adblock Plus, Video DownloadHelper, GreaseMonkey, and Firebug. Currently, users of those and add ons, and many more, will experience some issues with memory leaking that can see Firefox eat up gigabytes of memory as opposed to the few hundred megabytes it should use at the most. Crashes as a result of memory leaking problems are also not uncommon.
“Users who upgrade to Firefox 15 won’t have to upgrade their add-ons to see the benefits. While it is hard to predict the effect of this improvement on any individual user, many users should experience greatly reduced memory consumption, particularly on long browsing sessions. This should result in better performance, fewer pauses, and fewer crashes.”
Now although this fix promises to fix the majority of the memory leaking add on problems, Mozilla by no means promises that this will result in all add ons being fixed. Given the thousands of add ons currently available for the Firefox browser it is virtually impossible for Mozilla to work with every developer to fix the problems.
Early testing on Firefox 15 shows memory leaking can be reduced by as much as 1.2GB depending on the number of tabs closed in a session and the add ons tested with.
