It's been a long-standing complaint leveled against Firefox that the browser uses too much memory and that it doesn't release memory efficiently when tabs are closed.
What's interesting here is the two-fold approach that Mozilla is taking. I come across a lot of people complaining about how Firefox uses memory, so this will come as welcome news to them. It will also help with the perception of Firefox's memory usage - once you learn about about:memory, an obvious thing to try is to browse for a while, close all tabs, and see what the memory usage looks like. This change will help everyday browsing a lot. Even if you don't force garbage collection, it still helps greatly, because garbage collection happens periodically anyway, and longer browsing sessions will benefit more than shorter sessions. 108MB) after closing a number of tabs and forcing garbage collection. in short, the size of the heap was over 5x smaller (21MB vs. This may help with perception, too people might think "geez, Facebook is using a lot of memory" instead of "geez, Firefox is using a lot of memory".Īlong with per-compartment reporters comes dramatic improvements to the JavaScript heap fragmentation: One nice thing about this feature is that it gives technically-oriented users a way to tell which web sites are causing high memory usage. The first is per-compartment reporters, which should help power users and ordinary users see what's going on: One of those improvements is the way that Firefox handles memory usage.įirefox developer Nicholas Nethercote outlines some of the changes. Firefox 5 might just be out of the gate, but Mozilla is working hard on improvements for Firefox 7.
0 kommentar(er)
