Firefox 7 is released

Mozilla has released Firefox 7 today.

Mozilla has released the seventh edition of their popular brower Firefox this morning.

The new browser version looks very similar to Firefox 6, however Mozilla claim that the new version uses between 20% and 50% less RAM. This will address an old complaint about the excessive memory consumption often seen with this browser.

Mozilla claims that start-up speed, tab opening, menus and buttons on websites will load faster as a result of the changes. Of particular interest  to web developers, the organisation states that “Heavy Internet users will enjoy enhanced performance when lots of tabs are open and during long Web browsing sessions that last hours or even days”.

One noticeable change is that Firefox has followed the lead of Google Chrome and hidden the http:// or https:// extension on URLs in the address bar.

Lifehacker has performed a series of tests to measure the comparative performance of Mozilla Firefox 7 against Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome 14 and Opera 11.51. In most tests Opera won, although Firefox performed second-best overall and certainly a lot better than IE9.

To test whether you have the latest version of Firefox, go to Help > About Firefox. A window will appear and Firefox will check for the latest version. If it’s not already been installed, the latest version will be downloaded and installed on the spot. Users who do nothing should receive the update in the next couple of days as it’s pushed to users.

Have Your Say

Δ