March 14, 2008 (Computerworld) Work done to plug Firefox's memory leaks and reduce its RAM profile has paid off, two of Mozilla Corp.'s engineers said today, as they claimed that the newest beta of their open-source browser uses less memory than rivals such as Internet Explorer and Opera.

According to Mozilla software engineer Stuart Parmenter, who was instrumental in managing the memory reduction work, Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 uses less memory than IE7, Opera 9.5 Beta 1 and Firefox 2.0.0.12 while it opens multiple pages. Just as importantly, the newest beta of Firefox 4 does a much better job reclaiming memory when tabs are closed than its predecessor, Firefox 2.0.0.12.

"The terminal state of Firefox 3 is nearly 140MB smaller than Firefox 2. 60% less memory!" Parmenter wrote in a long blog post earlier this week describing the work of Mozilla developers in reducing Firefox's memory footprint. "[And] Firefox 3 ends up about 400MB smaller than IE7 at the end of the test!"

Firefox now discards content in the back/forward cache after 30 minutes, Parmenter said, and uses a timer-based font cache, too.

That work, and the other memory-related changes, have been worthwhile. "There are a bunch of different reasons why it's good to address memory [consumption]," Parmenter said. "The more memory churn, the slower the program will be. And you can look at it as a memory fragmentation [problem], where you can end up with bad effects over time due to holes in memory. It's hard to reuse certain sections of memory, and [things get] slower as applications look for a new place to allocate memory."


Source: ComputerWorld

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N1K: ...

Wonder how will new IE8 work

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May 03, 2008
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