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Sad Firefox, with an ABP logo on its face

Last yr, Mozilla published a blog post in which it noted that popular ad-on Adblock Plus could, under certain circumstances, drastically increase memory usage in Firefox. The trouble was related to how Firefox handled ABP's style sheets and could, in certain edge cases, send memory usage rocketing up to 2GB. While non necessarily a problem for relatively high-end systems, enough of midrange computers go grumpy if a process sucks down that much RAM — and applications that utilise that much memory also accept a tendency to bog downwards in general. Firefox 41, released yesterday, solves this problem, with impressive results.

Firefox doesn't seem to have explicitly chosen out the comeback in its version 41 patch notes, but the team at ABP noted the divergence in their ain writeup of the new release. I don't normally use AdblockPlus on Firefox, but I decided to accept the new version out for a spin on this test site. If yous're still on a pre-41 version of FF and you use ADP, you lot'll see RAM usage explode on that examination page — my browser topped out around ane.89GB. Later on an update to FF41, the same page tops out effectually 500MB — and keep in mind, that'due south a custom worst-case scenario for this style sheet bug.

Memory usage on Firefox should now be roughly similar whether you use Adblock Plus or not. In that location'southward no word on whether or not it volition bear upon some of the other pop adblocking clients, some of which were designed to get around ABP's high retentiveness employ in Mozilla's browser in the start place. According to VentureBeat, the new release contains a number of other improvements, including instant messaging as part of Firefox Hello, improved box-shadow rendering, and a range of additional programmer-side improvements.

Web brower market share. Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Web brower market share. Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Whether this volition do annihilation to fix Firefox'southward long-term browser share decline is some other question. Different tracking standards count browser share differently, but nigh reports agree — Firefox is long past its peak usage and has surrendered a great deal of its market position to Google Chrome. Microsoft clearly hopes that Windows 10 and its nascent Border browser will reverse that trend. Given that Windows x goes to great lengths to prepare its new browser as the default option for cease-users, we expect to see some motility in Microsoft's direction in the long-term, though how long that persists is still an open question. End users are frequently comfortable installing their own browsers, and that could work confronting any attempt Microsoft makes to regain lost market share. Firefox, meanwhile, needs to keep working on reducing its reputation equally a memory hog.