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Mozilla has released the final build of Firefox 7.0 for Windows, Mac and Linux today. The latest stable release is said to correct an issue that has plagued the browser over the past several iterations, resulting in a faster and more responsive web experience.
Firefox has been plagued with memory leak issues for years and the team at Mozilla finally addressed this in Firefox 7. MemShrink is an initiative that began in June to eradicate the browser's memory inconsistencies.
One aspect of MemShrink is better Javascript garbage collection. It's said to work more frequently now and should free up more memory when multiple tabs are open. This also means you can leave the browser running in the background and it will automatically free up unused memory, something that many previous versions were not capable of.
Users should expect Firefox 7 to be more stable than previous releases. This has to do with fewer OOMs, whether due to address space exhaustion or otherwise. This will result in fewer crashes due to mishandling of OOM or aborts.
Mozilla developer Nicholas Nethercote claims that Firefox 7 uses less memory than the past three versions, between 20 and 50 percent less in some instances.
Other minor changes include dropping http:// from the awesome bar and shading the sub-domain section of a URL a lighter grey. Firefox Sync now processes password and bookmark changes faster as well.
You can download a copy of Firefox 7 by clicking here. More adventurous users can try Firefox Aurora v8 or Firefox v9 (Nightly) although these are only recommended for experienced users or developers.
User Comments: 40
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After doing the upgrade to 7.0, I started getting memory usage warnings from AVG. Turns out Firefox is now using 470 - 520 MB ram on the Windows 7 system I use here at work. I'm working on reducing it, but I sure wasn't seeing a MemShrink, lol.... Love Firefox, btw...
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Well it wasn't FF's fault of course - turned out to be a couple of misbehaving add-ons that probably weren't following garbage collection rules or something. Now FF is at 68MB...
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LNCPapa said:
Firefox builds up a page cache so that you can hit the back button and go back to where you were before... this means that the observation that my firefox is using 200MB and someone else's is using 1GB is irrelevant and pointless - the memory footprint grows as you browse... To check memory usage you would need identical systems with identical add ons browsing exactly the same sites, etc. So really it's all just blahblahblahblah...Thanks Caravel - so many people seem to lose site of that. A majority of the memory usage is based on your browsing habits.
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The time you spend complaining on forums and news sites you could be working to make $30 to buy more ram. Lazy cheapos.
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Nothing changed in my daily use. Was consuming ~ 500 Mb RAM with version 6, it is consuming ~ 500 Mb RAM with version 7.
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Initially even I reverted to version 3.6 after trying version 4 for just a couple of hours. Then I started reading up on the subject and finally managed to get it to look and feel just like 3.6 with which I was very comfortable.
Only grouse I have is that half the time my addons turn out to be non-compatible. The one I need the most -FEBE - simply does not exit once it is done. Although less frequently - it still misbehaves. Quite often it willsimply go into the background when I close it. I have to use IBProcMan from old times to actually kill the process so that I can start it again when I need it!.
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As someone else said above, did it ever cross your mind that perhaps some people have reached their system's memory limit? Unless you didn't know, motherboards don't support limitless amount of RAM.
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Sorry but Firefox 7.0 solved nothing.
I'm running a Windows 64bit machine with 16GB of memory so I could care less about memory usage generally but Firefox 7.0 is still using 200mb with all of the plugins disabled.
If it keeps doing it and they don't solve it or at the very least ADMIT there's a problem, I'll switch to Google Chrome or just use MS IE 9.0.
Neither use anywhere close to this Open Source Crap Firefox 7.0 and 6.0 before it.
How does an otherwise good product like Firefox turn into a huge piece of crap within a few months?
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Dear Guest before me blaming it on people machines, trust me, I've been doing this for over 30 years and Firefox 7.0 and Firefox 6.0 before it, have a huge problem with memory usage leaks and it's still not been resolved ....
The browser starts out using about 74mb and within 1-5 minutes it's using 200MB or more.
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LOL, Firefox 7.0 is now using 310MB of memory.
It starts at about 74mb and just climbs and climbs and climbs. This started in one of the 6.0 updates. prior to the initial 6.0, I had no issues.
The problem I have is they won't ADMIT there's a problem.
I've disabled evry freaking plugion, clear every thing under the sun and still ridicoulous climbing memeory leaks even with 7.0
I never thought i'd ever say this but I'm going back to Microsoft IE 9.0, it's stable and uses about 74mb consistently
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Yeah... you might want to try Opera or Chrome before going back to IE. Don't forget that IE is interlinked with the OS, so it will ALWAYS be much more vulnerable than other browsers, no matter how "secure" they make IE itself.
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I've had huge issues with Firefox 6: I usually have two windows open with each 5-15 tabs at all times, and no matter how many tabs you close and open, the memory climbs up until changing tabs jams up Firefox for a couple seconds each time. In the process, it would go up to 1.4gb if I didn't close it for two days. Mind you, I had the problem both at work (16gb of RAM) and at home (8gb RAM), and it doesn't matter how much RAM you have in your computer; at some point Firefox itself just can't seem to handle it until it just crashes. So no, buying extra RAM means nothing in this instance.
I've only been on Firefox 7 since this morning, and it's up to 676 mb already, but it's still smooth. Hopefully the issue is fixed, otherwise this could be the beginning of the end for Firefox. I can't deal with it jamming every time I open or close a new tab, it's a nightmare. They are rapidly losing to Chrome, and I suspect this might be the number one reason why.
They REALLY need to step it up, or get eaten up by the competition.
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Yes mine too, its using over a Gig of memory and slow...
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Firefox 7 seems worse than Firefox 6 for me. Back to getting regular crashes caused by memory leaks. Very disappointing.
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i'm using FF8 in Lubuntu 11.10 and it is abyssmal in performance. i keep having to kill it in task manager because inside 30mins it has hogged about 800-950MB ...
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