Firefox 7 has much lower memory overhead and is faster

With the news yesterday that Mozilla will be canning the ‘version' numbers on upcoming Firefox releases it appears that the next release (V7) is going to be the first to use new algorithms which the company are calling ‘MemShrink'.

According to reports, this technology can reduce the memory overhead by as much as 50 percent. The latest beta is already available for download for Windows, Macintosh and Linux and if you are using Firefox Beta then you should be automatically updated.

The official release date of this version is actually not far away, being scheduled for September 27th.

Nicholas Nethercote, a developer for Memshrink has already said “Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less. In particular, Firefox 7′s memory usage will stay steady if you leave it running overnight, and it will free up more memory when you close many tabs.”

He added “This means that Firefox 7 is faster (sometimes drastically so) and less likely to crash, particularly if you have many websites open at once and/or keep Firefox running for a long time between restarts.”

Mozilla have said that the response time of the latest beta is much better, especially with complex website designs and web based applications.

This could be one of the most important new additions to the platform in years. They claim that Firefox 7 offers ‘significant benefits' when compared against any other version of the browser. We haven't yet had time to thoroughly test the latest versions, and we would love to hear your feedback.

Kitguru says: Less memory demands and better response times. Sounds like a win-win.

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