Mozilla Continues To Tweak Firefox’s Memory Usage

By | January 4, 2012 | 10 Comments

Mozilla Continues To Tweak Firefox Memory UsageAccording to a few tickets that are floating around the bugzilla.mozilla.org web site, it looks like the company behind the open source web browser is really determined to save you as many bytes of memory as possible.

Originally submitted back in July of 2011, a bug #670967, which was marked as resolved just a week ago, aims to “fire a memory-pressure event when the amount of available virtual address space or physical memory is low”.

The second one, which has been submitted in April of 2011 and resolved today, aims to compress all the cache items that are compressible, reducing the memory cache usage.

Although the implementations are ready, we are not exactly sure, which Firefox version will receive them.

[Thanks, Shane Bundy]


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Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism carrier back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

  • Asknobody

    For FF devs the real problem is that memory holes in FF are doubling every week. The more they fix, the more FF crashes and slows down

    • https://openid.org/midnite1 Midnite1

       Can’t say that your statement is totally true, as I have yet to experience any Crashes or slow downs in either FF 9.01 or FF UX 12.01a (Nightly).

      I do suspect that the problems that you are experiencing are more Hardware related than that of the Browser! 

      • Guest

        And or an unstable extension. So many scenarios. Hardware, extensions, plugins, user fault/error.

        • http://anarkidiri.wordpress.com/ Alex

           Agree. I’m using Firefox 10 now. About 4 days ago, I tried to switch to Chrome, but then I realized, Chrome is not better than Firefox. So I switch back to Firefox. Yes, I had to do “about:config” and remove some of the plugins. With my 1GB RAM, everything’s fine. But I hope the devs team will fix this issue ASAP.

    • http://twitter.com/bricky149 Shane Bundy

      I agree with Midnite1. I’ve been using the trunk builds of Firefox and I haven’t experienced any crashes or unstability so far.

      I can sense a BS flag because Mozilla don’t release a new version of Firefox every week.

  • http://twitter.com/bricky149 Shane Bundy

    I can confirm Mozilla are due to release this optimisation with Firefox 11.

  • Gfjgfh

    i had many crashes, slowdowns and freezes with 9.0 and 10.0 and i went to Chrome.. for now, i will see how Firefox around version 14 or so

  • Guest

    Just ignore the Chrome/Opera trolls. Firefox uses far less memory than bloatware browser like Chrome or Opera.

    http://media.bestofmicro.com/K/6/309174/original/memuse40tabswbgp7.png

    • http://my.opera.com/rafaelluik Rafael

      I don’t believe Chrome/Opera users are the ones complaining about Firefox memory usage, does that really make sense to you?

      I wanted to know which 40 random tabs are those and what were the versions tested, but anyway I don’t care about RAM usage. I don’t know why people open the task manager to see this… Unless something is really slow (then you discover it’s a plug-in or something -.-) there’s no necessity of this.

  • 1234– FF UX is the BEST!

    Ok well, firefox usses LESS memory as compared to chrome.. but the problem is.. that when people open task manager.. they should realize that chrome has so many processes.. and so.. it seems as if its barely using any resouce.. the actual issue is that whyen you start to see ff  slow doen..

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