Earlier this year, Mozilla decided to take a new and interesting approach to developing its Firefox web browser. Instead of waiting several months or even a year between versions, we are now seeing major new versions of the Firefox browser being released within weeks of each other. Indeed Firefox 6 is currently scheduled for release sometime this week. But Mozilla"s creators are already working on the following version, Firefox 7.
In a blog post written by Nicholas Nethercote, one of Mozilla"s programmers, he claims that Firefox 7 will have a solution that many users of the web browser will be happy to hear. He says, "Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20 (percent) to 30 (percent) less, and sometimes as much as 50 {percent) 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."
That"s a massive improvement over Firefox 6 which technically hasn"t even been officially released. Nethercote points out, "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." He credits the improvements in part to MemShink, a new effort by Mozllla designed specifically to decrease Firefox"s memory usage and this may just be just the beginning. He says, "... development versions of Firefox 8 already have even better memory usage, and I expect we’ll continue to make further improvements as time goes on."