Whether this will do anything to fix Firefox's long-term browser share decline is another question. According to VentureBeat (Opens in a new window), 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 developer-side improvements. There's no word on whether or not it will impact some of the other popular adblocking clients, some of which were designed to get around ABP's high memory use in Mozilla's browser in the first place. Memory usage on Firefox should now be roughly similar whether you use Adblock Plus or not. After an update to FF41, the same page tops out around 500MB - and keep in mind, that's a custom worst-case scenario for this style sheet bug. If you're still on a pre-41 version of FF and you use ADP, you'll see RAM usage explode on that test page (Opens in a new window) - my browser topped out around 1.89GB. I don't normally use AdblockPlus on Firefox, but I decided to take the new version out for a spin on this test site. Firefox 41, released yesterday, solves this problem, with impressive results.įirefox doesn't seem to have explicitly called out the improvement in its version 41 patch notes, but the team at ABP (Opens in a new window) noted the difference in their own writeup of the new release.

While not necessarily a problem for relatively high-end systems, plenty of midrange computers get grumpy if a process sucks down that much RAM - and applications that use that much memory also have a tendency to bog down in general. The problem was related to how Firefox handled ABP's style sheets and could, in certain edge cases, send memory usage rocketing up to 2GB. Last year, 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.

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