Firefox 7 will be the slimmest Firefox to date thanks to big memory improvements

Sep 20, 2011 18:21 GMT  ·  By

Firefox 7 should be coming in seven days. Mozilla is pushing a new version of the popular browser once every six weeks now, so the last couple of releases haven't really been that impressive.

But Firefox 7 is gearing up to be the biggest update since Firefox 4, with a number of performance improvements, some UI tweaks and support for newer technologies.

Significant memory usage improvements

The headliner in Firefox 7 is the memory usage improvement. Mozilla started the MemShrink effort to optimize memory usage in Firefox, which had again become a problem after the release of Firefox 4.

The team around the project has been squashing bugs and working on new ways of improving memory use and plugging leaks. It's an ongoing effort, but already, Firefox comes with some significant improvements.

Your mileage may vary, but improvements in memory consumption can be as much as 20 percent, 30 percent and even 50 percent in more extreme cases.

As a result, Firefox 7 will be the slimmest Firefox ever, quite an achievement, especially with websites and web apps becoming more powerful and more hungry for resources.

Firefox 7 drops the 'http' and the trailing slash from the address box

For brevity, Firefox will stop displaying the leading 'http://' from URLs and will also remove the trailing slash, making the address of a website easier to make out.

This, along with the fact that the domain name is highlighted, in black, while the rest of the URL of a page is dimmed, displayed in gray, should help with readability.

Secured pages will still display the leading 'https:/' Google Chrome already trims the URL when appropriate.

Telemetry add-on reports memory usage and performance to Mozilla

Firefox 7 users will also be able to help out Mozilla with the Telemetry add-on. The add-on will send anonymized usage stages, indicating memory use and general browser performance and responsiveness, which will help Mozilla know where the problem areas are and what to focus on.

Hardware acceleration for HTML5 Canvas on Windows

Windows Vista, 7 and 8 users should notice a big improvement in Canvas animation rendering since Firefox 7 now uses hardware acceleration via Direct2D for these HTML5 animations.

Firefox 7 also comes with a number of other improvements, for example, Firefox Sync performance is significantly improved when syncing new bookmarks or passwords.

Firefox 7 will migrate to the stable channel on September 27, however, the official release will come only after a few more days of testing. If you just can't wait that long, you can grab the beta and start playing with that, it should be quite stable at this point.

Firefox for Windows is available for download here. Firefox for Linux is available for download here. Firefox for Mac is available for download here.