14 DAY TRIAL // A new Firefox is coming out every six weeks. Each new version is better than the last one, but a lot of times, there are only a couple of new features worth talking about and rarely really important ones. That comes with the territory when you decide to launch a new major version every month and a half.
There's another reason why there have been relatively few new features added to Firefox lately, Mozilla is very focused on what's under the hood, constantly improving performance and optimizing the browser.
There are two main projects designed to speed things up, somewhat intertwined as you'd expect, "snappy" and "memshrink," the first designed to make Firefox feel more, well, snappy, the latter designed to minimize memory usage.
The Snappy project got underway late last year. The team identified several issues that could be tackled in a relatively short amount of time and that yielded the greatest results.
The first tangible results landed in Firefox 11, but a new batch of improvements has made its way into Firefox 13, now in the beta channel.
Tabs load on demand
One feature that Mozilla is highlighting is tabs on demand. It's a simple trick, but a very good one. When Firefox first starts, only the websites in the visible tabs and the App Tabs are loaded.
This could mean anything from one website to several, five, six, it depends on how many windows you have open, how many app tabs and so on.
But the rest of the tabs are not loaded until you click on them. Until now, all tabs were loaded at startup, so if you had a lot of them open, Firefox would take a long time to load and would perform sluggishly until most of the tabs were loaded.
Tabs are loaded on demand in Firefox 13 by default, resulting in significant performance improvements at startup.
A new cycle collector
The cycle collector is the mechanism that keeps memory usage in check. It runs from time to time to see if memory is being used that is no longer needed and frees it as possible. This makes sure memory usage stays low, but it's a performance hit.
"In Firefox 13, the cycle collector is more efficient, spending less time examining memory that is still in use, which results in less pauses as you use Firefox," Mozilla explained.
Start-up time
"Firefox start-up time is visible to all users. Our investigation into start-up has identified a number of unoptimized routines in the code that executes before what we call 'first paint'. 'First paint' signifies when the Firefox user interface is first visible on your screen," Mozilla added.
The team has been working on optimizing everything that is done while the browser starts up, file calls, audio sessions, drag and drop and IO in general. This means that Firefox becomes available faster than ever.
Mozilla boasts about several other improvements from the Snappy department, big and small, all of which add up to a browser that is more responsive, meaning a better, more fluid experience for the user.