Firefox 7 to consume much less memory than Firefox 5 says Mozilla

Firefox is the second biggest web browser on the market internationally. And yet it still has a long way to go with developing its program in terms of memory consumption, the technical team at Mozilla have been working on exactly that and have released information which shows Firefox 7 will consume as much as up to 50% less memory than the current version of Firefox which is Firefox 5.

According to Mozilla employee Nethercote:

“Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% 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. 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”.

However, as bad as the browsers memory consumption may seem Mozilla has stressed that its browser is still one of the best in the field and that a lot of problems users experience are due to add ons not the browser itself, Nethercote went on to say:

“I always cringe when someone files a bug report complaining about Firefox’s memory usage and they have many (e.g. 10, 20 or more) add-ons installed. The chances of all of those add-ons behaving themselves is pretty low, unfortunately. For example, one user found that the CyberSearch 2.0.8 add-on causes the places SQLite database to grow to over 300MB. Another user found that one or more add-ons caused that same database to grow to 1.2GB(!); the add-on(s) responsible has not yet been identified.”

But the morale of the story here is Mozilla isn’t complacent, it has spotted the fantastic performance of Chrome and realised it needs to match or better Chrome in terms of Browser performance and it seems by the time Firefox 7 arrives we could be in store for a more reliable and less hungry Firefox.