I received an update for Firefox 9 today and I’m very pleased with its improved memory (RAM) management. Firefox used an average of 600,000 K for about ten open tabs, however, since the new release of version 9, we’re now down to an average of 200,000 K. I’m not even interested to see what other improvements they made, because quite frankly, this is the big one I’ve been waiting for. So, if you are like me and have dabbled in other browsers, such as Chrome, Opera, etc. since then, it’s safe to say that Firefox is back!

Here are some of the memory related bugs that were fixed:

• 669815 Type inference uses too much memory
• 646913 Massive memory usage when viewing www.cnn.com
• 678997 memory leak in widget/src/android/AndroidBridge.cpp
• 148636 Enormous memory usage rendering with lots of form elements
• 124608 Imagelib memory usage issues
• 503108 Memory usage climbs slowly but continuously on downloadstats.mozilla.com

Featured image by Charlotte Coneybeer.

Comments (2)

Previously posted in WordPress and transferred to Ghost.

Alan Seiden
December 28, 2011 at 3:25 pm

Good. Excessive memory use, and related crashing, was why I stopped recommending Firefox to my friends (though I still use it for its add-ons). Maybe it’s time to return.

Ryan Sechrest
December 28, 2011 at 3:41 pm

I use a lot of Firefox add-ons myself, which is why I’ve been tolerating the excessive RAM usage, but I was hoping that it’d only be a matter of time when those problems would be addressed.