Mozilla gets tough on Firefox memory leaks

Mozilla will try to plug more memory leaks in Firefox with a new, aggressive approach that relies on weekly bug triage meetings, the company said last week.

"It's become increasingly clear over the last several months that we have a pretty pressing need to deal with increases in memory usage in Firefox," said Johnny Stenback, a Finnish developer who works for Mozilla, in a message on a company mailing list last Thursday. "Since we released [Firefox] 4 (and before, too), we've seen lots of reports about Firefox memory usage being higher than in older versions, and that Firefox memory usage is growing over time."

In response, Mozilla has launched an initiative dubbed "MemShrink" that hopes to put an end to Firefox's memory leaks.

As part of MemShrink, Mozilla will kick off weekly meetings where developers will triage bugs, come up with plans to quash the bugs, and assign them to specific programmers. "It's pretty clear by now that this is a much bigger problem than any one person can likely tackle," said Stenback.

Mozilla has also posted a MemShrink entry on its in-house wiki that provides more details on the project.

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