Firefox 15 has just been released, and it’s noted on this Mozilla blog that Fx 15 “prevents most memory leaks” caused by add-ons.
I wasn’t so much interested in that, but rather if Fx actually releases memory properly when a tab is closed.
From my cursory examination of the browser, yes it does. FINALLY.
The test I used was to load some script-heavy sites and see how things turned out, so I used Facebook (which is chock full of crappy scripting) and YouTube (also chock full of crappy scripting + Flash for even more memory hogging).
On my personal system, Fx did in fact release memory properly when a tab was closed. This is something I’ve wanted Fx to do for… years now? Well, it’s really late to the party as this is an issue that should have been taken care of a long time ago, but it finally does the memory-release thing right as far as I can tell.
That alone is a reason to upgrade to Firefox 15 if you’re currently using an older version.
And if you haven’t checked out Firefox in a while, try version 15. On some sites I notice Fx actually outperforms Chrome, particularly when it comes to sites with heavy-for-the-sake-of-being-heavy scripting like Facebook. Obviously, your mileage may vary depending on your system setup and what add-ons you use, if any.
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Idea/suggestion (assuming such a thing doesn’t already exist somewhere): Someone should make and maintain a consolidated chart of each of the major internet browsers comparing their various aspects with some measure, like, speed, memory usage, security, compatibility, etc. It would sure help decide not only what browser to use, but what to use for a specific function.
I only mention it here because you seem to usually do a good job covering the new browser updates of significance.
bout time !!!
Maybe it does, but I installed it to try it out, and it won’t load my GMail.