Firefox 15 Released - Fixes Add-on Memory Leak
Posted on: 2012-08-28 16:14:52 By Sebastian Anthony @ ExtremeTech Mozilla has released Firefox 15 for PCs, smartphones, and tablets. The most standout features are a completely silent background updater (like Chrome), significant memory footprint improvements, a built-in PDF reader, better SPDY protocol support, and a new native UI for Firefox Mobile on Android tablets. Mozilla debuted an early version of the background updater in Firefox 12, but it still harried the user with various pop-ups. With Firefox 15, the browser now downloads and applies updates in the background, and then switches to the new version the next time you open the browser — just like Google Chrome. The Firefox add-on memory leak has finally been fixed. For almost as long as I can remember, the only surefire way to reduce Firefox’s bloated memory footprint was to close it down. In theory, closing tabs should have the same effect — forcing add-ons to relinquish their memory allocations — but until now it hasn’t. Your mileage will vary, depending on which add-ons you use, but in general you should notice quite a big reduction. Read more...
Note that users already running Firefox will have the browser automatically offer them the upgrade. |