Fixes to memory footprint and garbage collection arrive in Firefox 7

While the improvements they're promising are certainly a Good Thing, one bit jumps out at me:<p>"introduced a significantly improved about:memory page with buttons that can manually trigger garbage collection (GC) and cycle collection (CC)... hitting these buttons repeatedly — or by hitting “Minimize memory usage”, which triggers both processes three times in a row — you can reduce Firefox 6′s memory footprint significantly."<p>Really? Really, guys? That is a wincingly strong code smell. Why is it necessary to press the button more than once? Why is it necessary to press the button at all? I appreciate that it's hard to get all of this working correctly, but that's a clunker of a design - it tells me that this feature does not actually <i>work,</i> but instead kinda-sorta-maybe works. Something like that should, pardon the cliché, Just Work - it is way out of the scope of things you should have to care about while browsing.

Nicholas Nethercote's blog has more technical details about the work he and others are doing to measure and optimize memory use in Firefox: <a href="http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/category/memshrink/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/category/memshrink/</a>

They should have been working on these issues a long time ago. I think they are far more important than many of the new features that came with v5. The only thing holding many of us back from using FF is the memory issue. Good thing the FB debugger is so awesome, because that's the only thing that keeps bringing me back at this point.

&#62; Firefox 5 was all about bug stomping and the stillborn channel switcher, Firefox 6 will see the addition of lots of HTML5 and CSS3 features and more privacy controls, and Firefox 7 — at long last — will focus on memory management and performance increases.<p>This kind of summary is potentially misleading. It isn't like there is a preplanned 'theme' for each release, or that everybody focuses on one thing each time then switches to something else.<p>Mozilla constantly focuses on several things at once. So there are memory improvements in FF5 and FF6, not just FF7. It isn't as if until FF7 no one cared about memory, which the summary almost implies. (But, it's possible the memory improvements in FF7 are turning out to be bigger than previous ones.)<p>I realize the article was just doing a quick summary and there's nothing wrong with that. Just wanted to post this comment to avoid possible misunderstandings.

<a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058#c31" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058#c31</a> / <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2728706" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2728706</a>

You know, I have a lot of RAM in my laptop, but Firefox - even the latest release - still gradually slows down over the course of a single day. If I leave it running over night, my whole system becomes sluggish, every keypress takes visible time to render a character. I was pretty disappointed when I had to leave my perfectly configured Firefox behind to switch to Chrome, but the thing is just so much more stable.

" As we all know, Chrome isn’t actually a whole lot faster than Firefox, it just feels snappier — something Mozilla no doubt wants to emulate."<p>I'm glad they're focusing on memory. Better late than never but I see frequent claims similar to these that Chrome isn't that much better or might have a slight advantage which we will catch up soon, blah blah blah.<p>C'mon guys. When's the last time Firefox put Chrome on the offensive. Playing catchup leaves you several steps behind. When FF7 rolls out next month or whenever this new release cycle comes Chrome might be even faster and snappier.<p>I still remember when I switched from IE to FF. It was faster, lighter and had more innovative features. Suddenly the web got more exciting. It's the same feeling I had using Chrome only they never dipped below that initial experience.<p>FF right now is like Elvis' jumpsuit era. Out of shape, lost, struggling with identity, and now about to go on Celebrity Fit Club.<p>FF is still my primary browser but only for the extensions.

I can't believe I just got called a "mom and pop beige-box surfer"...

PLEASE can we not start posting every vapourware announcement from Google and Mozilla now that they are doing browser releases every few weeks? This sort of change might be interesting if it was actually available in a production build today, as the title half-suggests it is unless you know that Firefox 7 is still months away. Do we really want the HN home page to become a stream of dev feature announcements, though? Even Slashdot moved away from doing that.

Also coming in Firefox 7: The number 7.

Too little, too late. Chrome has already won.