Mozilla Firefox 7 Released

Martin Brinkmann
Sep 27, 2011
Updated • Mar 15, 2012
Firefox
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With the rapid release cycle and all, we are seeing more releases of the Firefox browser than before. Mozilla just pushed Firefox 7 to the official ftp server to prepare for today's release of the browser. Firefox 7 is actually the first version of the rapid release cycle that is showing big improvements over previous versions.

You may remember that both Firefox 5 and 6 did not ship with big new features or improvements. Well, this changes with the release of Firefox 7. When you look at the new features you will notice one sticking out: Mozilla managed to improve memory usage of the Firefox web browser drastically (that's the organization's word). What does it mean in detail? A blog post by Nicholas Nethercoate over at Mozilla has the answers:

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.

Up to 50% less memory usage is a big number. Probably even more important than that is that the browser won't feel like eating up all the RAM over time anymore, which is definitely a good thing, considering that the browser has a reputation for being memory inefficient.

The changelog lists addition features, including a new rendering backend that speeds up Canvas operations on Windows, support for text-overflow: ellipsis and the Web Timing specification and faster bookmark and password changes syncing when using Firefox Sync.

Firefox 7 is currently not available on the official homepage. It is likely that the developers are still preparing for the new release. Some mirror servers are already listing Firefox 7 for all supported operating systems and languages, while others do not. Expect a release announcement in the next 24 hours.

Firefox stable users will receive update notifications shortly in the browser to update automatically to the new version.

Beta, Aurora and Nightly users will also be pushed to a new version in the coming days. Check out Future Firefox Features, What I’m Looking Forward To for some pointers as to what you can expect in those versions.

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Comments

  1. Tom said on October 9, 2011 at 8:58 am
    Reply

    Firefox 7.0.1 keeps wiping out my theme settings and switching to the default theme. It doesn’t matter what them I select… Very frustrating!!!

  2. Daniel said on October 4, 2011 at 2:57 pm
    Reply

    But you know, what gets me is the fact that Seamonkey uses about 80K on my system and it has an email client incorporated!

  3. Daniel said on September 30, 2011 at 2:48 pm
    Reply

    I’ve noticed that Adblock Plus is a real power hog.
    Without it, i get around 80M-100M (without more than 3 other addons).
    But after you’ve used for so long, it’s hard to do without.

    1. Cattleya said on October 4, 2011 at 1:48 pm
      Reply

      Ok, you can try this suit:
      + Replace AdBlock with SimpleBlock, Karma Blocker, these two extensions is faster and you will can’t notice about memory leak like AdBlock.
      + I recommended you to use FlashBlock, this extension save Firefox CPU Usage, also save RAM and it is a very small extension.

      1. Daniel said on October 4, 2011 at 2:41 pm
        Reply

        Thanks for these alternatives Cattleya!

        Actually, i have about a dozen addons goin’ (one incompatible) and FF runs anywhere in between 135K-160K. I did remove a few a non-essentials and gradually testing but so far, it’s not really that bad.

        (Don’t like addons that remove flash but leave a space with a big letter).

  4. Cornel said on September 30, 2011 at 1:49 pm
    Reply

    Less memory consumption ???? Hmm … WHERE ???
    My Firefox 7 still uses 180-200 M from my RAM (and I only have 512 M on my system …)
    I don’t think that anything to do with the fact it’s not the stock firefox, but the OpenSuse 11.4 compiled variant……
    So, please, wouldn’t it be better if you don’t copy Microsoft’s way of lie to people with stuff that’s not really present in the software ????

  5. FX8 said on September 30, 2011 at 12:19 pm
    Reply
  6. Daniel said on September 28, 2011 at 4:23 am
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    Did notice that it was higher than before then i thought, oh! oh!
    there’s bound to be an addon who’s not quite ready for 7 so,
    i removed a few non essentials and yup, it went down down.

  7. Mike J said on September 27, 2011 at 9:30 pm
    Reply

    Well, after an hour or so, can’t see any great memory advantage to v7.I will continue to monitor it.

    1. Cattleya said on September 28, 2011 at 10:03 am
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      I think Firefox just improves javascript memory performance, not image memory performance.
      https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=660577#c119
      But be patient, this problem will be fixed soon.

      Open this page, Firefox will freeze by image cache problem: http://www.clarosa.info/firefox/bug.html

      1. Mike J said on September 28, 2011 at 3:41 pm
        Reply

        I thought the promise was simple RAM usage?? In any event,I don’t see any great advantage there. However, the browser is noticeably snappier,which I did not expect.

  8. FX7 said on September 27, 2011 at 5:25 pm
    Reply

    http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

    Firefox 7.0 Final released

  9. Cattleya said on September 27, 2011 at 3:33 pm
    Reply

    If Firefox fixed this bug, it will become a perfect browser:
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=660577

    That is a big bug, I always afraid of opening webpage contain large amount of image with Firefox, with a webpage have >400 images with normal file size(800×600), Firefox will freeze.

  10. SAiNT said on September 27, 2011 at 1:54 pm
    Reply
  11. Mehdi S said on September 27, 2011 at 1:36 pm
    Reply

    An opera update is well overdue :) Both Chrome and Firefox have had at least 2 :)

  12. ilev said on September 27, 2011 at 11:16 am
    Reply

    Has Mozilla removed the bloated memory hog plugin-container.exe in Firefox 7 ?

    1. Mark said on September 28, 2011 at 5:36 am
      Reply

      The plugin container prevents the browser from crashing when a plugin crashes. Firefox has no control over plugin-container’s memory usage.
      ALL of the memory usage plugin-container takes is due to the plugins it houses. If there was no plugin container, the memory allocated by plugins would be folded into the usage by firefox.exe.
      Thus, if plugin-container is taking up memory, blamer your plugins.

    2. Anonymous said on September 28, 2011 at 4:12 am
      Reply

      plugin-container isn’t a memoryhog, it prevents your entire browser from crashing…

      1. Sandeep said on September 28, 2011 at 6:04 am
        Reply

        If you read previous articles here you will realize ilev is a FUD troll.

    3. Martin Brinkmann said on September 27, 2011 at 11:21 am
      Reply

      No

  13. shahram said on September 27, 2011 at 11:00 am
    Reply

    i’m just a happy chrome user and i’m not gonna move back again to any browser!

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