Upon hearing news that Firefox 7 (and 8) had memory management in it that actually worked, I downloaded it and decided to give it a go.
There’s not really any screenshots I can show because if you’ve seen Fx 5, you’ve seen 6 and the upcoming 7/8, so there’s nothing new in the how-does-it-look department.
The way to make Firefox 6 or below chunk up in memory use is unfortunately way too easy. Load up two tabs the auto-refresh content, such as your webmail of choice and Facebook. Check the memory being used, then let the browser sit. After about 15 to 30 minutes, check the memory use again. It will have skyrocketed at that point.
If you do the same in Fx 7, will it release memory like it’s supposed to?
YES.
I can say with 100% certainty, at least on the Windows platform, that Fx 7 did in fact release memory appropriately and didn’t leak it all over the place like it typically does – and that, is awesome. This means you can leave the browser open with sites that auto-refresh and simply not worry about it.
This doesn’t come without drawbacks however. There are a fair amount of add-ons that will not work with Fx 7. Eventually the add-on developers will catch up, but for the time being, nope. For example, at the time of this writing, the Xmarks add-on works in Fx 7 but TinEye doesn’t. You’ll find similar scenarios with many add-ons. Some will work, some won’t – although it’s probably true the ones you want to work will not.
If on the other hand you run Firefox ‘bare’ with no add-ons (which many do), you can go ahead and run Fx 7 beta 1 now.
The download is here: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/7.0b1/
Why not 8?
Fx 8 at this point is only in alpha stage and is too unstable for me to recommend. You can run it if you want, but I don’t suggest it. Fx 7 beta on the other hand as far as I can tell is stable enough to use now.
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I’m running 9.0a1.
Wimp!
:p
The 9.0a1 installer is smaller than the 8.0a1 installer for Windows. Go figure.
I wouldn’t know. This is my portable test install, which I think I’ve been running since at least the 4.0a1 nightly. So I just get the updates as they go along.
They’re all here: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/
The 9 win installer is 0.1MB smaller at 14.1MB compared to 8 for whatever reason. Not saying that’s good but just weird.
The 3.6.20 installer is way, way smaller at 8.2MB: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/latest-3.6/win32/en-US/
Blooooaaat.. bloatbloatbloatbloatbloat.
nice post thanks for sharing. i like it.Yes.
Thanks for sharing..
I have been having the same problem since FX 4… If I open more than 2 tabs or windows my FX crashes.. This is driving me insane!!!