Review: Firefox 7beta

I had been having some RAM issues with my machine recently.
I realise 2GB of the stuff isn't a whole lot these days, but it should certainly suffice for my basic Internet use and blogging needs.

An OS re-installation (downgraded to 32-bit OS) seemed to fix it for a while, but within a week I saw that RAM was being hogged quite badly once again.

The culprit, undoubtedly this time around, was the Mozilla browser, Firefox.

  After a quick bit of research I found that since v.3, with each subsequent release, Firefox had indeed been gaining a reputation for hogging RAM.

The browser would 'lock up' RAM especially through use of flash (e.g. youtube videos).
Even when tabs/windows were closed the RAM remained inaccessible to other programs.

As a fan of Firefox and its features, I was disappointed to learn this, but it seemed there was good news.

Developers of the browser had been tinkering away on something they called 'Memshrink' which is designed to address the issue.
And luckily for me, Firefox 7 (utilising this development) has just been made available in beta.

I eagerly installed the software and, running it, immediately noticed it took up far less RAM than its predecessor (less even than the other browser I use, Opera).
I opened three tabs to play flash videos, in addition to my blogger and gmail tabs. Not only did my computer not screech to a halt, even with all three playing, but when I closed them the RAM was freed up right away. 

Is Firefox 7 beta any use?
I'm thrilled to say, without a doubt - certainly where my RAM problem was concerned.

You can download it here.