Firefox 15 kills leaky zombies

Mozilla Firefox 15 continues the open-source project's efforts to reduce rampant memory consumption. This time, the focus turns to add-ons; it prevents the extensions from leaking memory from 'zombie' DOM structure references. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers wonder if it'll now run in 640K.

By Richi Jennings: Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. Not to mention: Photoshop katastrofi Suomeksi ​​lehden...
  
  
John P. Mello Jr. reports:

Much criticism has been leveled at Firefox...over its piggish memory practices, but...it has made great strides.
...
Firefox 15 also supports the Opus audio format [which] offers better compression than formats like MP3, Ogg, or AAC...can dynamically adjust bitrate, audio bandwidth and coding delay; and supports both interactive and prerecorded applications.
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The "prime time" version of Firefox 15 is scheduled for availability August 28.      

      
Jeremy Proome adds:

Mozilla has released a beta version of Firefox 15, which is focussing on...memory leaks...caused by “zombie compartments”...portions of web page information that are stored after you close a [page].
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[It] is said to clean out these compartments, making [it] much more efficient.      

Mozilla's Nicholas Nethercote has the gory details:

Firefox 15...will significantly reduce Firefox’s memory consumption...is likely to be faster...and less likely to crash.
...
[M]any add-ons have memory leaks...such as Adblock Plus, Video DownloadHelper, GreaseMonkey and Firebug...the top four add-ons! ...these add-ons each exhibited a particular kind of leak that we call a zombie compartment. ... Users with multiple add-ons are more likely to suffer...high memory consumption, which has the following visible effects.

• Long freezes. ...
• General sluggishness during basic operations. ...
• Occasional drastic slowdowns...due to the paging of data. ...
• Out-of-memory crashes or aborts.      

So Scott Gilbertson looks at it from the webdev PoV:

Mozilla has been working to solve Firefox’s memory issues for some time as part of its MemShrink effort. ...but for most users much of the appeal of Firefox lies with...add-ons. Unfortunately, those add-ons are often a source of memory leaks as well.
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That’s especially good news for web developers since the popular Firebug...add-on has also been the source of some memory woes. ... There’s other good news for web developers...including some improvements to Firefox’s new baked-in developer tools...support for the SPDY networking protocol v3 and the CSS word-break property.      

And Fabian Scherschel relays the results:

During testing with the infamous memory hog SiteAdvisor 3.1.4...1.4 to 1.7GB of memory [was] released when closing 150 tabs [vs.] 200MB [in Firefox 14].
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From version 17, Firefox developers are planning to cut down even more...by also deleting sandboxes [that] are not being used.      

      
And Finally...
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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and security. He's also the main author of Computerworld's The Long View and IT Blogwatch -- for which he has won ASBPE and Neal awards. A cross-functional IT geek since 1985, Richi also publishes a full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.