Mozilla's new Firefox 7 takes a lot less memory
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Sep. 28, 2011
Mozilla has released its new Firefox 7 and now the new browser takes a lot less memory and other PC resources,
says Mozilla.
According to its development team, Firefox 7 will consume up to 50 percent less of your system's RAM (random access
memory) than past versions with most users stepping back 20 to 30 percent in the amount of memory consumed-- a great
improvement from previous editions.
Firefox 7 apparently achieves this thanks to a project started in June called MemShrink. The project's goal has
been to improve the architecture and code in Firefox by eliminating bugs behind memory leaks and putting in place
best practices to detect regressions.
With Firefox taking substantially less RAM, the idea is for Mozilla's browser to become dramatically faster and
less likely to crash if you have lots of web sites and tabs open all at once, or if you keep Firefox running for
long periods of time between restarts.
And other features in Firefox 7 include the fact that Web Sockets are now enabled by default on mobile and for
two-way communications with a remote host for HTTP.
Additionally, the Canvas element for graphics has been updated for faster performance as well. All in all, it looks
like Firefox 7 is a lot faster than previous versions.
High Tech News Today has upgraded and downloaded the new 7 browser this morning and we can confirm that it is
faster, and in our case, it took about 19 percent less memory on one of our machines here which happens to be a
Quad-Core Intel PC with 8 Gigs of RAM running Windows 7 Ultimate.
In other high tech news
Nanotechnology researchers and scientists are currently exploring a new type of nonvolatile memory that not only
has the potential of being a lot faster than today's flash RAM, but it would also require about 99 percent less energy
to deliver the same memory. Needless to say, the technology could have a bright future.
Called FeTRAM (ferroelectric transistor random access memory), this new revolutionary technology is based on a new
type of transistor that combines silicon nanowires with an organic ferroelectric polymer that switches polarity when
an electric field is applied to it.
The technology is detailed by researchers working at Purdue University's Birck Nanotechnology Center in a
just-published paper in the American Chemical Society's Nano Letters.
According to a news release from the Birck center, the new memory is a step beyond existing nonvolatile FeRAM
technology in that data can be read from a FeTRAM in a nondestructive fashion due to the ferroelectric transistor.
FeRAM uses capacitance to release the data, and once you read it, it's gone.
The purpose of the FeTRAM research is to create a long-lasting, low-power, read/write data container. "You want
to hold memory as long as possible, 10 to 20 years, and you should be able to read and write as many times as possible,"
researcher Saptarshi Das says.
"It should also be low power to keep your laptop from getting too hot and using too much battery resources. And
it also needs to scale, meaning you can cram many devices into a very small area," added Das.
Although doctoral-student Das and his professor Joerg Appenzeller have demonstrated a working circuit, they're a
long way from a marketable product, however. "It's in a very nascent stage," Das says.
And despite being in the very early days of testing, they claim that the FeTRAM circuits will be able to be built
using the same manufacturing techniques that are used for today's industry-standard CMOS chips.
In the ongoing drive to lower power requirements and increase speed, we'll be keeping our eye on FeTRAM as it
competes with other such future-tech candidates as phase-change memory.
Source: The Mozilla Software Foundation.
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