Firefox 15 has been on the Aurora release channel since early June and by this time next week it will be on the beta channel.
The biggest news is the patch landed to fix bug 695480.
http://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/05/02/memshrink-progress-week-45-46/
This means that add-ons will no longer suffer from memory leaks. Well, there may be some that leak memory, but the number will have been greatly reduced. It’s reduced to the point where Nicholas Nethercote has said on his blog that he is crossing the add-on memory problems off his list of “Big Ticket Items”. He’s going to write more about it in his next post on August 8th.
Memory
problems in the Firefox browser have been fixed about 6 months now.
It’s got to the point where there aren’t really any issues worth talking
about.
However, part of the reason Firefox STILL has a reputation for
being a memory hog is the fact that the add-ons leak memory.
Most people
won’t realise this and continue to blame Firefox itself for the horrendous
memory consumption, instead of the add-ons which aren’t necessarily built by
Mozilla.
This single fix resolves all those problems with
countless add-ons, so the effect will be that perceived Firefox memory
problems will all but vanish for anyone using Firefox 15 or higher.
Thing
is, this fix isn’t even on the ‘major new features’ list, and so not
many people are talking about it. The effect however will be massive.
Everything else is simply icing on the cake. Firefox 15 is released on August 28th.