14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is hard at work to reduce the memory footprint of Firefox browser, and the company’s next major releases will bring significant improvements in this regard.
Firefox 67, for instance, could come with a new feature to automatically unload unused tabs, which should technically reduce memory usage and help improve performance, especially on low-end devices.
As discovered by GHacks, the new feature is already available in the Nightly build of Firefox, and it is expected to be part of a stable update sometime in the near future. However, chances for the next release to get it, namely Firefox 66, are rather small, so we should expect it in Firefox 67 in May.
Basically, what this new feature does is to unload tabs that you don’t use and whose content, which was already loaded in the background, eat up memory for no reason.
This system will be based on a priority list and first analyst regular tabs and pinned tabs. Firefox will then check regular tabs that play audio and then pinned tabs with playing audio.
The option to automatically unload tabs in Firefox will be part of the stable build for all supported desktop platforms, including here Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Other memory optimizations
Back in February, it was discovered that Mozilla was also working on other improvements for Firefox browser, again with the purpose of reducing the memory usage of the application.
This time, however, the focus was on extensions, as Mozilla wanted the add-ons to give up on JSON for IndexedDB as the backend for local storage. The company believes that this is an effective way of reducing the memory footprint of extensions, as they would load faster, so the application would need less time to launch.
This change, however, is expected to be part of Firefox 66, so we’ll get to try it out rather sooner than later.