I pity the fool company who is fighting Apple’s iPhone 5 event announcement with a new product launch or software update today, but we certainly couldn’t let this pass unmentioned. In keeping with their new, more aggressive release cycle, Mozilla has just released Firefox 7 for Windows, Mac and Linux.
What’s new? Speed! Mozilla claims they’ve finally fixed Firefox’s notorious inefficiency in handling memory. Hurrah!
As part of their new release cycle, Mozilla’s not exactly cramming in a lot of new features with each release, and Firefox 7 is no exception. That said, I think Mozilla’s focusing on the right thing here
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.
This means that Firefox 7 is faster (sometimes drastically so) and less likely to crash, particularly if you have many websites open at once and/or keep Firefox running for a long time between restarts.
According to Lifehacker, Firefox 7 is the second fastest browser out there after Opera when it comes to performance. As a Chrome user who abandoned Firefox because of its bloat issues, maybe it’s time for me to give Mozilla’s alternative browser another shot… or finally switch over to Opera.
You can download Firefox 7 for Mac here.