The big news this week was the release of Firefox 15<\/a>, which prevents most add-on memory leaks<\/a>.\u00a0 As a consequence, we were able to close open bug reports for several add-ons that no longer leak:\u00a0 Firebug<\/a> (yay!), Enter Selects<\/a>, LinkResolve<\/a>, We-Care Reminder<\/a>, Restartless Restart + SmartSearch<\/a> (the leak happened only when both were installed).<\/p>\n Although Firefox 15 prevents most zombie compartment leaks, some remain.<\/p>\n I haven’t heard much feedback about the release from actual users. This is probably a good thing, as users are much more likely to notice and report problems than improvements.\u00a0 One thing that has cropped up is that a small number of add-ons have had their functionality adversely affected by the change, i.e. they were accessing compartments for a page after the page has been closed.<\/p>\n If you have any additional add-ons that you think have been adversely affected by Firefox 15, open the error console and use the “filter” search box in the top right-hand corner to look for a message that says “TypeError: can’t access dead object”<\/strong> — that’s the message that indicates an add-on is trying to access memory via a reference that Firefox 15 has pre-emptively cut.\u00a0 Please report any problems in Bugzilla and put “[MemShrink]” in the whiteboard field.<\/p>\n On a related note, the discussion of Firefox 15’s release on various tech sites prompted me to debunk<\/a> the common misconception that Mozilla claims “this is the release that fixes the memory leaks” on every release.<\/p>\n Andrew McCreight fixed a problem involving the cycle collector that could cause occasional leaks<\/a>.<\/p>\n Brian Nicholson roughly halved the amount of memory used in Firefox Mobile’s page readability check<\/a>.\u00a0 (This wasn’t actually marked as a MemShrink bug;\u00a0 I just chanced upon it today when looking at TBPL.)<\/p>\n Nick Cameron fixed a small, obscure leak<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n
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