Mozilla Firefox has never been good with system memory consumption, the free open-source web-browser is a very well-known memory guzzler thanks to various memory leaks in it's codebase. There have been various un-official solutions to the problem and addons like RamBack do help make things in-control a bit, but nothing works as a concrete solution to the problem which is needed to face-off today's tough competition.

Mozilla developers have now decided to finally address the issue seriously and a dedicated team called MemShrink is now in-operation to tackle the issue.

A quote about the project MemShrink from Wiki At Mozilla :

MemShrink is a project that aims to reduce Firefox's memory consumption. There are three potential benefits:

1. Speed: less cache pressure, and less paging. The latter is crucial, as it can destroy performance.
2. Stability: fewer OOMs, whether due to address space exhaustion or otherwise. This results in fewer crashes (due to mishandling of OOM) or aborts.
3. Perception: fewer people will complain about Firefox being a memory hog.

These factors are doubly important for Firefox Mobile.

There are two main facets to this:

1. "Slimmer" memory usage, e.g. more space-efficient data structures.
2. Avoiding "leaks". This loose use of the term (which is used throughout this document) includes:

• True leaks, where memory is lost forever.
• Lifetime issues, where memory is not reclaimed until you close the page/tab/window/process.
• Collection heuristic issues (e.g. GC is too infrequent in certain cases).
• Bad cache algorithms and poorly tuned caches.
• Fragmentation.

Leaks are generally more important, as they are more likely to lead to horrible performance.