Mozilla released Firefox 7 this week, and wasted no time touting its improvements. According to the company, behind-the-scenes tweaks to its latest web browser will help developers craft quick-loading, HTML5-based content. Users should experience overall speedier web browsing thanks to a drastic reduction in memory usage.
Firefox Developer Nicholas Nethercote called the new browser "lean and fast," using anywhere from 20 percent to 50 percent less memory than its predecessors. As a result, Nethercote said customers can expect fewer crashes during lengthy or straining browsing sessions.
Airing out some dirty laundry, the developer was frank about Mozilla's past issues with memory efficiency.
"Firefox has a reputation for being a memory hog, and the efficiency with which it uses memory has varied over the years," he admitted. "For example, Firefox 2 was quite bad, but Firefox 3, 3.5 and 3.6 were substantially better. But Firefox 4 regressed again, partly due to a large number of new features (not all of which were maximally efficient in their first iteration), and partly due to some over-aggressive tuning of heuristics relating to JavaScript garbage collection and image decoding."
Firefox 7 is the first beneficiary of Mozilla's ongoing "MemShrink" project, and Nethercote believes it will pave the way for future improvements.
Christopher Blizzard, director of web platform at Mozilla, covered some of new browser's developer-focused highlights at Hacks.Mozilla - additions which the company has worked on the entire summer, he said.
Firefox 7 boasts text-overflow ellipsis and no more automatic browser window resizing. Pointing to a demonstration of HTML5-based game "Runfield," the director boasted the new browser's handling of the canvas element was much faster than previous iterations.
"We've revised our code for Canvas based on what we learned in previous Firefox releases and how people are using Canvas in the wild," he explained. "Based on that you are likely to see much snappier performance on many demos when drawing to canvas elements."
Other tweaks for devs include Navigation Timing Spec support and updated WebSockets protocol.
Firefox 7 can be downloaded here. Mozilla's next browser update, Firefox 8, is set to release on November 8th, 2011. (via The Mozilla Blog)
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