Download Firefox 7 Final
After several Beta builds, Mozilla has announced everyone’s anticipated, Firefox 7.0 Final release.
To address recent (and not so) complaints, Firefox 7 has drastically reduced its memory usage and fixed several stability issues. In addition to that, Mozilla’s open source web browser also includes a few new features:
– A new rendering backend to speed up Canvas operations on Windows systems
– Bookmark and password changes now sync almost instantly when using Firefox Sync
– Support for text-overflow: ellipsis
– Support for the Web Timing specification
– An opt-in system for users to send performance data back to Mozilla to improve future versions of Firefox. This can be enabled by installing an add-on
Download: Firefox 7.0 for Windows
Download: Firefox 7.0 for Linux
Download: Firefox 7.0 for Mac OS
[Thanks, DWBH]
About (Author Profile)
Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.
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What about the “vastly improved memory usage (up to 50% better) and increased speed” that were promised?
Ah, good, you added that part in. :D
It was there from the start ;)
I guess I’m special since I see things before others do it seems. :P
It is somewhat improved as the latest lifehacker speed test shows. But the overall results of the test show that Opera is the fastest on average.
The 4th version as you may know already, was a major overhaul and thus, time was needed to be perfectly optimised. Since version 7, everything is in perfect shape and from now on, it will keep getting continuously better with great improvements and especially additions which long time was needed.
In version 9, shortly before Christmas, we’ll be speaking for the P-E-R-F-E-C-T browser. Keep it in mind.
“Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20% to
30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less. In particular, Firefox 7′s
memory usage will stay steady if you leave it running overnight, and it
will free up more memory when you close many tabs.”
Mozilla are not promising the earth, but improvements have been made. As far as I am aware the memshrink project is on-going and so further improvements will be seen in future versions of Firefox. Which versions? I’m not sure, but Firefox 7 is only the start.
It will also be interesting to try out the new Aurora 9 with the improved javascript performance.
Firefox 9 nightly uses very less Memory on my PC compared to other browsers out there. The JavaScript and rendering performance are on par with the latest Chrome dev. Of course, Chrome still feels faster, but the difference here is minimal.
Everyone who’s having poor performance even in the latest Firefox is definitely affected with old, buggy user profile of Firefox. To create a new profile, Press Win+R, type in firefox.exe -p And create a new Firefox profile.
Your browser should be back to fast now.
http://lifehacker.com/5844150/browser-speed-tests-firefox-7-chrome-14-internet-explorer-9-and-more
I have enough memory, so I want not the smallest memory fotprint, but efficient memory management. FF loading tabs slower than my granny running marathon
Im sorry but how can Opera be a winner of a cold boot. NO WAY IN HELL.
Do SSD’s somehow make Opera start faster than others?
Nope, I’m running it via WD green, which is about one of the slowes hdd out there, and it still outpace FF on Cold and warm boot.
Just make sure to clean your profiles first.
If your going to create a new profile you will lose all your addons. So make a list of your addons before creating a new profile and then install them after setting up a new profile
Yep. Forgot about that. Thanks. :)
i wanna be a mongoose……….. can i be a mongoose dog?
It’s good but what are the major differences between this and say version 5
I’ve been using the beta builds of version 7 as my default browser since
they came out and I have noticed that the memory usage has definitely
improved, but
the biggest improvement isn’t how many megabytes of RAM Firefox uses
compared with
other browsers like Chrome and IE.
Instead, use Firefox, then walk away
for an hour, do whatever your doing, come back to it and the memory
usage will be the same as when you left it. With Firefox 6 or any of the
previous versions that number would have massively increased within
just a few minutes of you walking away from your desk and by the time
you returned after an hour the usage would have been ridiculous and you
would have needed to restart your browser. Whilst it may not
be earth shattering progress, it is improvement nonetheless.
Firefox 5 fixed about 992 bugs, 6 fixed 1415 and then 7 fixes about
another 1220, so I am keeping up to date just to cover all the minor
fixes as well as the major changes.
Almost no changes in appearance from Firefox 4 on March 22nd to Firefox 7 on September 27th. Lots going on under the hood.
Below is a link to what I think is the best page to find out what is
going on in Firefox, and what will be coming up in future releases.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Release_Tracking
Just as bloated as before..
Ahh just spotted the UPTO in the changelog. So that would mean 1% nominally and 50% in the Mozilla testcase.
Actually what Mozilla have done here is VERY wrong. They have sacrificed performance with a compact memory model, as that’s how bedroom “experts” measure a browsers memory efficiency. They fail to grasp the concept hat if you have your PC stuffed with memory, to get the best performance it should use as much as it needs to to get best performance possible.
Isn’t that what Opera does already?
No, Opera’s memory usage is adapted dynamically to the system. It uses more if there’s more available.
100% agree. Opera runs smoothly both on today advanced monsters and old slow dino’s. It consumes as much as memory that gives best performance without causing system to get on low memory situation.
On machines with little memory (I recall hearing that 2GB is what is now considered “little memory” but I’m not sure of the point or points where it changes), Firefox omits things. The drastic reductions in memory usage in Firefox 7 have not been at the cost of any data stored or any performance. They have been things like these:
– Fixing memory leaks
– Removing double allocation of memory (such as a situation in which it would round up to a power of two and tack on a sentinel value, and then put on another sentinel value and round up by a power of two – doubling memory usage on such allocations.)
– Better garbage collection (free up more memory when closing tabs; strictly this is fixing memory leaks, but I’ll give it its own point as it’s an important part of it)
I say it again: the memory usage improvements have not been at the cost of any performance. Rather, they have been increasing the efficiency of Firefox.
i think that Firefox is doing fine, people dont want memory usage, performance will come after that, im happy with Firefox 7’s performance, and it seems like Firefox will be running steady for a long time, it seems like Chrome will overthrow IE, and it will be like this:
1. Chrome
2. Firefox
3. IE
but i cant be sure, since MS are making IE 10, which will support many of the modern standards like HTML5 support as good as Chrome, but i would never use IE, since it lacks addons
I don’t care about marketshare, I just want the best ABS fastest browser, that’s why I Use Opera, anyone that has properly evaluated all browsers on a te technical level will be too.
ABS does that refer to your six pack or your Anti-lock Braking, I Googled it but nothing seemed to fit in with the context of your post.
As for the fastest browser they are all fast enough these days ,probably Chrome has the edge if anything at least in Benchmarks , back in the real world Opera is faster to use with its Mouse gestures, speed dial, nicknames,sessions,Opera Turbo etc………….
The main reason I love Opera is because it has the most flexible user interface try comparing Opera’s Appearance window Shift+F12 with Firefox’s Customize or Opera’s preferences to Firefox’s Options even the right click context menu on a page is richer with Opera’s open with , block content, edit site preferences.
I just opened 100+ tabs (basically my entire bookmarks folder) and firefox loads just as fast than with a couple tabs opened. (Obviously Chrome isn’t even usable with 50+tabs open) Plus it’s only using 700,000K out of my 2GB of memory. Awesome! (I also have 62 addons installed)
Using the Firefox Nightly channel 10.0a1 & 111 tabs it only used just over 1 GB , I have 6GB in my PC.
Opened the same tabs in Opera & it used 1.8 GB of memory but loaded all the pages far faster.
I configured the Opera tab bar to show the extender menu to be the same as FF , with Firefox you have to scroll to see any overflow of tabs which means you cannot see all the tabs at once, Opera you just click on the more button at the bottom of the page & the overflow goes in to a second column which makes it a lot easier to see when all the tabs have loaded.
That would be a useful feature to have in Firefox.
Only if having a hundred plus tabs open is normal browsing for you, should be very easy for Firefox to implement a minor tweak like that if they want to.
Personally I don’t like the extender menu I prefer that all the tabs shrink to fit & when they get too small I use the Windows Panel which shows all your tabs & Windows & also allows for tab stacking.
I found an extension that is kinda like opera’s feature: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/
There was a couple of Opera snapshots that auto stacked the tabs I loved it , unfortunately Opera removed the automatic part , now I don’t use stacking , theres lots of requests to bring it back which will probably happen.