MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — The release this week of Firefox 7 has improved browsing speeds by using a MemShrink project, which decreases memory use by 20 to 50 percent.
Mozilla officials said Firefox 7 addresses issues such as poor memory management, features new developer tools, more graphics hardware acceleration and a reporting tool allowing alerting Mozilla about problems, DailyTech.com reported.
“Mozilla Firefox provides a speedy web browsing experience for users and new tools to help developers create faster websites and web apps,” the company said on its blog.
A report in PCMag said that the MemShrink project has sped up the browser’s startup time from 8 seconds in Firefox 6 down to 5 seconds.
The reduced memory also improved the use of tabs and menus and speeds up certain HTML content.
The company said Firefox now supports the W3C navigation timing spec API so developers can measure page load time and website navigation against bandwidth speed, website traffic and other factors.
This API allows developers to test user experiences remotely and easily and quickly optimize websites and Web apps for different types of users.