Mozilla hatches plan to tackle memory leaks in Firefox add-ons

Mozilla began an aggressive campaign earlier this year to trim Firefox’s memory footprint with a new initiative called MemShrink. The first fruits of that effort landed in Firefox 7, which was released in September. As a result, Firefox’s memory consumption is now between 20 to 50 percent lower. Building on that success, Mozilla is expanding the scope of its MemShrink initiative and looking to address memory consumption in additional areas.

In a blog post published earlier this week, Mozilla’s Justin Lebar proposed a strategy for tackling memory leaks in third-party add-ons—a common source of Firefox memory problems. Firefox’s add-on ecosystem is one of the browser’s great strengths, but it also presents challenges.

Add-ons can behave in unpredictable ways—it’s not always clear to users when a problem they encounter in Firefox is caused by the browser or by third-party code. As Lebar says, the time has come for Mozilla to start taking a more active role in protecting users from add-on misbehavior. Mozilla already loosely polices its add-on site to protect users from malware, so taking proactive steps to flag leaky add-ons seems like a logical step.