Firefox 7 Performance and Memory Handling Is So Much Better

Finally, after many years of poor memory handling, Firefox 7 introduced the best feature added in Firefox recently – improved memory handling.

Firefox 7 Performance

Mozilla claims that the improvement is often 20% to 30% less memory usage but users can observe up to 50% less memory consumption with Firefox 7. To prove that, Lifehacker tested browser speeds.  The contenders were Firefox 7, Chrome 14, Internet Explorer 9 and Opera 11. At the end of the test, Opera came out on the top place overall, followed by Firefox, Internet Explorer and lastly, Google Chrome.

Below is one of the benchmark results for memory usage using 5 extensions. It shows that Chrome 14 is the poorest web browser with extensions in memory handling. This is a big win for Firefox because it seems that Google Chrome is adding more bloat in every iteration.

I did my own tests. I opened more than 10 tabs with JavaScript-intensive websites like Gmail, Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and my WordPress admin panel. I also watched several YouTube videos without updating Flash to the latest version. Take note that I also have a dozen add-ons installed.

At the start of my test, Firefox is consuming about 350 MB and it slowly climbed 600 MB after I opened more tabs. I let the tabs open for several minutes and closed the tabs one by one. I monitored the memory consumption and  I’m impressed that the memory consumption is depleting. I let one tab open and the memory consumption hovered 380 MB only. Before upgrading to Firefox 7, Firefox memory consumption will never go down below 500 MB if I do the same test.

So, it is true! Firefox 7 uses much less memory than Firefox 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Other New Features

To continuously improve future versions, Mozilla added an opt-in system (telemetry) to send performance data. This is helpful to make future Firefox releases leaner and faster.

Just in case you did not allow Firefox to collect anonymous data the first time, you can enable it here by going to…

Options -> Advanced -> General (tab)-> Check the "Submit performance data" checkbox.

Apart from improved memory handling, Firefox Sync is also improved. It now syncs almost instantly.

Firefox 7 added a new rending back-end that speeds up Canvas operations on Windows. Also added are support for  text-overflow: ellipsis, Web Timing specification and improved support for MathML.

For the complete release notes of Firefox 7 desktop version, check this out. We can expect 2 more major releases from Firefox this year. Up next, Firefox 8.