Mozilla’s open source Firefox web browser has expanded its feature set significantly over the last several years. One byproduct of that feature set growth has been an expansion of the system memory that Firefox uses.
With Firefox 7, which is being officially released today, Mozilla is taking specific aim at reducing the amount of memory that Firefox uses. Mozilla has been actively working on reducing memory usage by way of the MemShrink effort. The goal of MemShrink is to find areas where Firefox memory management and usage could be improved.
The memory usage in Firefox 7 also benefits from a 20-line patch that Mozilla developers first talked about in June. The 20-line patch enables Firefox to start twice as fast on both Windows and Linux.