We earlier reported that Mozilla has released the beta version of Firefox 15. Another interesting news that comes bundled with this beta release is the fact that Mozilla developers have implemented a "radical idea" to force add-ons to release memory allocated to them. According to the developers, many add-ons are causing memory leaks by not releasing their DOM structures when a tab is closed. This creates what the developers call zombie compartments – areas of memory that are never released, H-online states. 
It is a known fact that individual tabs utilise their own privileged memory compartments, the add-ons have to reference memory addresses in those tab compartments in order to communicate with websites- that are recorded in a list. The tweak in the latest Firefox 15 ensures that this list is checked when tabs are being closed or at the time new pages are loaded. Superfluous DOM references can then be deleted based on this check.
According to an online report, “During testing with the infamous memory hog SiteAdvisor 3.1.4, the developers apparently detected 1.4 to 1.7GB of memory being released when closing 150 tabs – the previous version of Firefox had only freed 200MB. McAfee replaced this version of the plugin quite a while ago because of its memory leak problems.”
Starting the version 17 of the browser, Firefox developers are working on ways to reduce even more memory usage by enabling deletion of sandboxes that are not in use. At present, these add-ons are often left behind, consuming more memory in the process. This poses further issue when add-ons use the new JetPack API which uses sandboxes heavily.
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