Mozilla Foundation Releases Firefox 7 452
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has released Firefox 7.0. It hasn't actually reduced my memory footprint at first glance, but let's hope that the memory usage doesn't keep growing like it used to. We'll also see if it crashes less often than once every three days or so."
The initial memory use of Firefox should remain similar to previous releases, but at least the heap shouldn't grow infinitely as it does in previous releases.
Re:Memory? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yesterday I started Firefox 6 and had it sitting just on the regular start page for a couple hours, with no other tabs open. Just sitting there, not doing a damn thing except showing the start page, it was using 50MB of RAM. Right now I have it open to a single tab and it's using 154MB of RAM and 226MB of virtual memory, so 380MB total. For 1 tab. I've seen earlier versions using well over 1GB of RAM at times, plus virtual memory. The memory usage seems to have slowed down the leaking and growing indefinitely large, but it still seems like a lot of memory.
But, considering that I have 8 GB in my computer, who gives a shit how much memory Firefox is using?
I'm going to go with "people who don't have 8GB of RAM". My gaming machine at home has 2, my work laptop has 1.
Re:Wait! (Score:3, Interesting)
life hacker confirms this, they really have been cutting the bloat lately
Re:microsoft had it right (Score:4, Interesting)
I am typically onboard with the software purists, but in this case I disagree -- I like the new numbering systems! Well, not exactly the number systems, but the development strategies they imply. For a piece of software that you write once and remains relatively stable, the major/minor/bugfix method is acceptable, because you very rarely do major design changes.
In something like Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, and their ilk, the distinction of when exactly a major version number should be bumped becomes a little less clear -- one UI update is deemed slightly more important than another, and all of a sudden you have a major version jump instead of a minor one. With rapid release schedules, the idea is that the changes from one release to the next will /all/ be small, but after a while if you compare e.g. FF 3.18 vs 3.1, they will be nothing alike, so why should they share a common major version number?
Moving to a Year/Month (e.g. Thunderbird 11.09) system I think is overall much cleaner for software releasing on a rapid development cycle.
Aikon-
Re:Wait! (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't worry, they're still showing the release notes from version 4. When I look at http://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/features/ [mozilla.org], nothing has apparently changed for a long time. The feature list starts with the "awesome bar" (it's still a nerdy childish name after all this time), and doesn't introduce anything newer after that. They've made it damn hard to find any kind of release notes or new feature list, or any explanation of why you'd want to upgrade from FF4. Talk about the inmates running the asylum.