The latest effort under way for Firefox is to dramatically shrink the amount of memory it requires, according to Mozilla developer Nicholas Nethercote.

"SpiderMonkey is on a diet," wrote Nethercote in a earlier this week, referring to Firefox's JavaScript engine. "There's an incredible amount of work being done on SpiderMonkey at the moment, and a lot of it will help reduce Firefox's memory consumption."

Indeed, though the changes may not be visible to users until Firefox 11 in several months, those and other related tweaks could result in a RAM footprint for the browser that's only a third of its current size, according to a on ExtremeTech.

'It's a Big Hairball'

Developers are changing numerous aspects of SpiderMonkey to achieve the desired slimmed-down effect. JSObjects, for instance, which represent objects, are being reduced in size from 40 bytes on 32-bit platforms and 72 bytes on 64-bit platforms to 16 bytes and 32 bytes, respectively, Nethercote explained.