Firefox’s well-documented six week release cycle means as soon as one version arrives, the beta of the next edition is no more than a couple of days away. True to that motif, just two days after Firefox 14 was released for Windows, Mac and Linux, Firefox 15 beta has arrived, which, among other things, takes care of a few nagging memory leaks.
The release of Firefox 14 brought heightened security, and in an age where consumers are becoming more and more aware of their rights to privacy and such, the changes were more than welcome. I’ve been running the newest edition for the past couple of days on both OS X and Windows with very little problem, but looking at the features of the Firefox 15b1, it appears the Mozilla foundation is staying true to its word in constantly improving its flagship product.
Of the many new implementations, the memory leak improvements stand out as the most significant, and Firefox 15 prevents the majority memory leaks caused by add-ons. As part of Mozilla’s MemShrink push to eradicate the issue of memory leaks, and although such problems only really occur when certain add-ons are installed (notably Firebug), the number and ease in which add-ons can be, well, added on, are one of the main pull factors of running Firefox in the first place.
For those reliant on add-ons in day-to-day browsing, the fixes in Firefox 15 beta will equate to a lighter browsing experience, with the client hogging less of your computer’s memory than with any previous iteration.
With Firebug being used frequently by developers, it’s certainly good news – particularly as the add-on has come under scrutiny in the past for memory-based issues. In fact, as a developer, the new beta has even more to take your fancy, including tweaks to the native developer tools as well as a more efficient JavaScript engine.
Nicholas Nethercote, head of the MemShrink movement, has promised the new beta can often yield dramatic improvements on memory consumption, while also being less susceptible to crashes, so is well worth checking out via the direct links provided below.
- Download Firefox 15 Beta for Windows
- Download Firefox 15 Beta for Mac
- Download Firefox 15 Beta for Linux
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