Firefox 7 Released

Mozilla recently release Firefox 7 on or around October 1st, 2011. A day later give or take a few hours depending on where in the world you live it was followed up with 7.0.1 update/patch.

Back in March they started cranking out a faster rapid release schedule for Firefox, which works out to somewhere along the lines of a new version every 6 weeks. I am not sure that we actually need a new version to deal with every 6 weeks, but maybe some folks out there like it that way.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it is an attempt to boost their release numbers to be similar to Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Currently, at the time of this post Google Chrome is at version 14.x and Microsoft Internet Explorer is at 9.x.

Mozilla Firefox 7 suggests a memory consumption reduction by as much as 50%. I haven’t had a chance to test it out yet, but previous versions 4-5 had definite memory usage issues. Version 6 improved slightly, but still not as much as I would like to see.

From what I have read Mozilla says most users will see a 20%-30% reduction in memory use when compared to Firefox 4. But, it is possible in certain situations some users will experience as much as 50% reduction. Of course they are comparing the current version 7 to version 4. I haven’t seen any numbers or figures comparing version 7 to 6.

If you have Firefox 6 upgrading to version 7 is supposed to fix 11 security vulnerabilities most of which are critical (the most serious).

For those that have Firefox 4, 5, or 6 you can simply upgrade through the browser itself.

The next scheduled Firefox release is supposed to be around November 8th, 2011. I guess in a few short weeks I will be posting something about Firefox 8.

You can download Firefox 7 directly from Mozilla here:
http://www.mozilla.com/

You can also check the Mozilla addon compatibility for Firefox 7 here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/compatibility

Currently the page is boasting a 99% addon compatibility rate.

Since Firefox 7 has only been out for a couple of days I think I will wait a little longer before jumping into an upgrade. I prefer to wait a bit to make sure there aren’t any major issues or bugs.

It used to be that a lot of Firefox addons wouldn’t work after an upgrade until the developer updated them. Now with Mozilla claiming a 99% compatibility hopefully there won’t be too many problems with installed addons this time around.