Firefox is one of the standard bearers of the open source movement as the Mozilla army of volunteers took on Microsoft that had left the browser world stagnant with IE6. And today they have released the latest version of the browser – Firefox 7.
The full version number change can really be ignored as it is part of Mozilla’s new rapid release schedule that sees a new version of the browser released every few weeks, but the update is still a major improvement. The most noticeable difference is in the memory usage that is down 20-50% depending on how you use the software after Mozilla engineers focused on an effort called “MemShrink” – that is a massive saving on resources, and according to the company
This means that Firefox and the websites you use will be snappier, more responsive, and suffer fewer pauses. It also means that Firefox is less likely to crash or abort due to running out of memory
Other improvement worth highlighting relate to how Firefox deals with the increasingly important HTML5 for animation and games by including a “hardware-accelerated Canvas”. The differences may all be under the hood, but everyone should see noticeable from their day-to-day usage of the software – and this might help Mozilla steal some momentum back from Google Chrome.