How does Firefox 4 improve memory use?

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One of the items that bugged many people about Firefox 4, until very recently, was its use of memory.

That is, Firefox 4 (to put it politely) was a memory hog.

That’s no longer the case as the browser is set to exit development and become generally available on March 22.

One of the biggest memory leak issues was fixed in Firefox 4 Beta 12 and it has helped to make the release candidate version of Firefox 4, the snappiest Firefox ever made.

“Beta 11 revealed a method JIT which is part of
Jaegermonkey JavaScript engine had been interacting poorly with tools created for Firefox 3, to
reclaim memory from object chains that get created by web pages,” Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox at Mozilla told me. “Beta 12 fixed a
lot of that.”

 It sure did.

Fixing that one leak alone, isn’t the only way that Mozilla developers have improved memory management and usage in Firefox 4.