Firefox 16 is scheduled to release tomorrow on Tuesday, 9th of this month, today we’re taking time to explain Incremental Garbage Collection major feature for which Mozilla has been worked over an year and Firefox 16 is the first version to support this feature. Mozilla assures this feature makes Firefox more smoother with unnoticeable GC pauses.
Heavy JavaScirpt websites consumes more system resources and hence browser takes more memory and freezes or crashes often. Garbage Collection which done for every 5 seconds or so in Firefox to free up memory used by JavaScript programs that no longer running on websites such as games and reused it to new JavaScript objects.
Due to GC Firefox gains slight performance and memory consumption will also be reduced to some extent, but during GC Firefox pauses or freezes for hundreds milliseconds which you can clearly observe when you pay attention with many tabs open and running sites with games or animations that involves JavaScript code.
To fix this Mozilla enabled Incremental garbage collection in Firefox 16 by default which makes Firefox more responsive and smoother which you can notice with mouse clicks and key presses. Animations and games will draw more smoothly due to this. with Incremental GC, GC time is divided into short increments where pauses are short lived and very difficult to notice.