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Comment by tzury | Hacker News Reader

To the Mozilla developers in here:

Although I am not going to install this version on my laptop (I am a chrome guy), I would like to take the opportunity and thank you for the great work you have done for the internet users and web developers.

In the days before firefox+firebug, we were alerting all the way in order to find an undefined / unassigned variable which was causing bugs and terror.

You have made the web a better place, you have made IE a better browser, and I tend to believe, you also made chrome a better browser, and chrome developers work harder by setting the bar that high.

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What I most like in the story of Firefox is how, after bringing competition to a field that had been stagnant for quite a while and after, thanks to its impressive success, reviving that field, it now benefits itself from that competition.

We are now at a time when ALL browsers, including Firefox, are getting better and better thanks in large part to the increasing competition.

It has been a great journey thus far for Firefox. My best wishes to all involved for better and better things in the future.

(Firefox user since v0.6 here. These days I also use Chrome and Chromium quite a lot, especially on Linux, but Firefox remains my main browser.)

another firefox since early beta user here. i do not remember the number of machines i installed firefox on to, but i really like that there is competition now and every version gets faster and better.

Another Netscape Navigator, err before that NSCA Mosaic user here, and yes we walked to school uphill both ways.

I love firefox but have suffered with the memory issues for years. Please free memory when I close tabs, or at least add a flush button so I can reclaim the 500mb it balloons to in a day or two of heavy usage.

Current Aurora builds (which will eventually become Firefox 6) have an improved about:memory page, which includes buttons that make Firefox run the garbage collector:

http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/05/23/a-better-abou...

In my experience, hitting the GC button rarely makes any detectable improvement. Right at this very moment my Firefox instance is using about 900MB of memory; hitting all three buttons in a row (garbage-collection, cycle-collection, "minimize memory usage") brings the number down to 892MB, ~750MB of which is apparently allocated to "heap-unclassified" and the JavaScript "gc-heap".

Work on reducing Firefox's memory footprint is ongoing; the most recent effort I know of is MemShrink:

http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/03/10/memshrink/

...and it's beginning to make some progress:

http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/06/22/memshrink-pro...

It's amazing this wonderful FREE software has evolved the web so much.

Open standards build the web. Free tools create a vivid creative environment.

For the first time as a developer i used firebug today and avoided alerts in my js. Thank you firefox :-).

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