Use Firefox? Download Firefox 7, it Reduces Memory Use & Increases Speed

Sep 27, 2011 - 21 Comments

Firefox 7

Firefox 7 is now available to download for all supported platforms, the new release has an emphasis on improved memory management and speed, and it does provide a noticeable difference in snappiness when loading pages or browsing the web.

The benefits are best seen if you keep Firefox open for a long time (who ever closes their web browser anyway?), use a lot of tabs, and view pages with a lot of images or text, and in my usage I can confirm it feels more responsive and has a lower memory footprint in OS X. The Mozilla dev team suggests that version 7 will use as much as 50% less memory, but I haven’t seen that dramatic of a difference. If you use Firefox for any browsing purposes or rely on it for plugins like Firebug, it’s well worth downloading.

You can grab Firefox 7 directly from Mozilla.org here

As usual, Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux are available concurrently. If you have plugins installed, expect a few to nag about compatibility, but they all worked for me anyway.

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Posted by: William Pearson in News

21 Comments

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  1. marvin nubwaxer says:

    with firefox 7 i get messages about excessive me mory usage i never got before with previous versions of firefox.

  2. Martin says:

    I wish there was a comparison from LH on OSX.

  3. Mario says:

    Actually, memory use went up with 7.0 over 6.0.2 quite a bit. Almost 2 times.

  4. Chip says:

    meh.. i’ll wait til next week for FireFox 8.

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  7. Enk says:

    Less memory? Three tabs open (Gmail, Google Searcher, and ArsTechncia) 764 MB and that does not include the plugin processes like craptastic Flash, et cetera. Horrible bloatware IMO.

  8. Michael says:

    Just downloaded this update…definitely seems faster than Firefox 6. I even had the Firefox 7.0 beta and this seems much faster when loading webpages.

  9. Albert says:

    Firefox is so much slower than Opera, that it really is unimpressive. After I open a third tab the spinning wheel on the tab looks like it is struggling to make something happen.

  10. Darian says:

    I might start using it again, if it stops hanging when I try to access bookmarks.

  11. Grant says:

    Still no Lion features, yet…hmm…that’s one thing I’ve really enjoyed about the Chrome beta. They jumped right on Lion with full screen browsing, two finger navigation, elastic scrolling, disappearing scrollbars…I realize not all the Lion changes are real useful, but at least they’re trying to stay recent.

    • Modernape says:

      Firefox has had all these features and more (twist to change tabs, pinch to close tab, rev pinch to open tab) since Snow Leopard (except disappearing scrollbars).

  12. Geek for i says:

    Any comparisons against Chrome yet? I miss my addons in FF tab mix plus for sure.

  13. Peter says:

    Don’t see much of a difference personally

  14. Biggs says:

    I’m getting 20k/sec from their crappy mirrors, they should have just mirrored it on Amazon S3.

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