The Mozilla Firefox web browser has quite the bad image when it comes to memory efficiency. You see claims all over the Internet that the browser is eating up more memory than other browsers. Comparisons often are not entirely fair to begin with, considering that most Firefox users have their fair share of add-ons installed in the browser which add to the browser’s overall memory consumption.
With Firefox 8 being released the minutes we speak, it is time to look at the improvements that Mozilla has in store for Firefox users. I have already covered the planned changes of Firefox 9, and the big JavaScript performance boost of that version in detail.
More interesting in regards to the browser’s memory efficiency and footprint are Firefox 10, or maybe Firefox 11. Firefox 10, which is currently available as a Nightly release (think of it as regularly released alpha versions that are not suitable for productive environments, may be the version of the browser that changes the user perception from a memory eating browser to a slim and efficient one.
Firefox developer Nicholas Nethercote some days ago detailed the changes that Mozilla has in store for the upcoming versions of the browser. According to Nicholas, the JavaScript engine is often the component of the browser that is “responsible for consuming the most memory”.
What Nicholas describes then are pages of “programmers-talk” about how Mozilla intents to reduce the browser’s footprint by optimizing various components and technologies of the browser’s JavaScript engine.
Probably the biggest news here is the retirement of the JavaScript engine TraceMonkey which will reduce the browser’s overall memory footprint and make the Firefox itself a smaller program. Jaegermonkey for the time being will become the only Just-In-Time compiler of Firefox. This again will change in the near future with the introduction of IonMonkey, a JIT compiler that is said to “generate code that is not only much faster, but much smaller”.
Mozilla developers are furthermore experimenting with technologies that reduce the overall size of JavaScript compartments in the browser. Some of the improvements promise great memory reductions. Luke Wagner’s proposition to reduce parts of scripts that are never run could reduce the “script-data” usage of the browser by up to 70%. Objects in SpiderMonkey, represented by JSObjects may see a size reduction of about 60%, while Shapes, another important data structure, will see optimizations that take them from 40 or 64 bytes to 24 or 40 bytes.
The majority of those memory optimizations will likely land in Firefox 10 or Firefox 11. Firefox users who now head over to the Nightly repository to download the latest Firefox 10 version right away will notice that the browser is not really showing any memory footprint improvements right now. Improving the browser’s memory efficiency is a work in progress.
What’s your take on browser memory consumption and speed? Is Firefox really that heavy on RAM usage?
© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: firefox 10, firefox 11, firefox memory usage, mozilla-firefox
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