The Mozilla team is taking drastic action to prevent memory leaks from crippling Firefox 4.
Johnny Stenback, a developer with Mozilla, posted the following on a message board last Thursday..
It’s become increasingly clear over the last several months that we have a pretty pressing need to deal with increases in memory usage in Firefox.
Since we released [Firefox] 4 (and before, too), we’ve seen lots of reports about Firefox memory usage being higher than in older versions, and that Firefox memory usage is growing over time.
Mozilla has launched a initiative called “MemShrink” with the aim to improve the performance of Firefox by putting a halt to its memory leak problems. “MemShrink” will result in weekly meetings where developers discuss actions they’re taking to plug the leaks.
The overall goal of “MemShrink” is to ensure that Firefox consumes less memory while it runs.
Personally, Firefox has always crawled on my Mac to the extent that it is now my 4th choice browser after Opera, Chrome, Safari.
Firefox was heralded as the web browser savior when it first launched and its main competitor was IE6. But if Firefox can’t solve its memory leak and performance issues, it may ultimately suffer the same fate as IE6.
