Mozilla Narrows Firefox Memory Gap With Latest Beta

Firefox 3 Beta 5 went live on Tuesday

In the release notes for Beta 5, Mozilla developers advised - - in the same general language used in previous version 3 beta release notes - - of continued efforts to fix its memory problems.

"Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox'3 over a web browsing session," the notes state. "Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned."

A gap in memory performance between Firefox and the other browsers, that as of last year was gigantic, is now manageable. In our Test Center, we took a look for ourselves. On an Acer Veriton L410 PC, running an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+, 1 GB of memory and Windows Vista Business, we pitted Firefox 3 Beta 5 against the most recent versions of IE, Safari and Opera.

We opened each browser at the same time. On each browser, we opened up three tabs: one tab was set to a live, Flash-based video stream at Yahoo Live; another tab was set to the Drudge Report, which auto-refreshes on a regular basis; and another tab was set to Channelweb.com. After about ten minutes, Windows Task Manager showed the biggest memory hog was still Firefox, which was eating 39,548 K; next was Safari, at 24,792 K; then Opera at 19,5167 K; then IE at 17,108 K.

The numbers were still consistent after 20 minutes, 40 minutes and an hour.

The good news for Mozilla and those who prefer Firefox is that it appears the days of performance-killing memory leaks could be dwindling. The good news for Firefox' rivals is that all the other browsers appear to do at least slightly better, still.