Mozilla's Firefox 7, slated to ship in late September, will be significantly faster because of work done plugging the browser's memory leaks, a company developer says.

Mozilla developer Nicholas Nethercote credited the "MemShrink" project for closing memory bugs in the browser and producing a faster Firefox.

MemShrink kicked off two months ago.

"Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20 percent to 30 percent less, and sometimes as much as 50 percent less," Nethercote said in a blog post Tuesday. "This means that Firefox 7 is faster (sometimes drastically so) and less likely to crash, particularly if you have many websites open at once and/or keep Firefox running for a long time between restarts."

Firefox has long been criticized for using large amounts of RAM and for not releasing memory when tabs are closed, practices that can degrade the browser's performance, or in extreme cases, cause it to crash or lock up.

Full story: InfoWorld