| Firefox 15 plugs the add-on leaks Nicholas Nethercote - Firefox 15 plugs the add-on leaks
July 19, 2012 - via Planet Mozilla
TL;DR
Opening statement(s) quote:
Firefox 15 prevents most memory leaks caused by add-ons, including Firebug. For many users with add-ons installed this will significantly reduce Firefox’s memory consumption, without requiring upgrades to those add-ons.
For those users, Firefox 15 is likely to be faster (sometimes drastically so) and less likely to crash, especially if they have multiple add-ons installed and/or keep Firefox running for a long time between restarts.
The Problem
A memory leak occurs when a program allocates some memory but then fails to free it. There are multiple causes of memory leaks, but they all have the same effect: an increase in memory consumption, which often grows as the program runs. This can cause poor performance, and even lead to crashes or aborts due to the exhaustion of available memory.
Closing statement: quote:
CONCLUSION
Over the past year, Mozilla has made great progress in reducing Firefox’s memory consumption. However, the excessive memory consumption caused by add-ons with memory leaks has remained an ongoing problem.
Firefox 15 fixes that problem. We have confirmed, via in-house testing and from real-world telemetry data, that it prevents the vast majority of leaks that occur in existing add-ons.
Users who upgrade to Firefox 15 won’t have to upgrade their add-ons to see the benefits. While it is hard to predict the effect of this improvement on any individual user, many users should experience greatly reduced memory consumption, particularly on long browsing sessions. This should result in better performance, fewer pauses, and fewer crashes.
Mozilla’s MemShrink efforts are ongoing. We have various projects in the pipeline that aim to further reduce Firefox’s memory consumption, and help users understand better how Firefox is using memory. Hopefully these changes will make it into Firefox releases not far from now!
and a whole lot of reading in between.
(Firefox 15 Beta (desktop) is scheduled for (final) release August 28, 2012.
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