Solution to Firefox memory consumption?

Firefox is reputed to be slow and consume a lot of memory. However, the truth is that it consumes less memory than Chrome / Chromium. However, while using the browser, it is true that Firefox begins to "eat" our RAM and does not seem to go down when closing the open pages. Apparently, Mozilla developers just found the solution.

After a long time trying to solve this problem, the Mozilla Foundation assured in a statement yesterday that they already found the problem, which will be solved in Firefox 7.

The Mozilla Foundation started an investigation into why its browser was consuming so much memory, that to date with version 5.0 it has not been resolved, but Mozilla seems to have already found the problem that caused such high memory use: the solution is to execute the “garbage collection” more frequently in the Javascript engine, thus achieving a significant reduction in memory usage.

This was one of the most reported problems by users and, why not say it, the most important Achilles heel of Firefox.

Testing in Aurora

How could it be otherwise, my desire to try this improvement (remarkable and long-awaited) was stronger than me. My test consisted of opening 20 tabs with Firefox 5 and Firefox 7.0a2.

Indeed, the consumption of RAM memory was significantly reduced, while Firefox 5 consumed 637.680KB (638MB), Firefox 7.0a2 consumed 444.252KB (444MB), that is, the saving was 193MB, which is not little and represents a saving of the 30% in memory consumption (as Mozilla promises). Later I found that with more tabs open, the saving in memory consumption also increases.

If you want to do the test yourself, you can download [Firefox 7.0a2 from here,]. This version not only reduces memory consumption, but also improves Firefox startup time, improves Sync function (bookmarks and passwords are instantly synchronized) and finally adds an improvement in font rendering.