"MemShrink is a project that aims to reduce Firefox's memory consumption. There are three potential benefits.
1. Speed. Firefox will be faster due to less cache pressure, less paging, and fewer/smaller GC and CC pauses. Changes that reduce memory consumption but make Firefox slower are not desirable.
2. Stability. Firefox will suffer fewer aborts/crashes due to virtual or physical memory exhaustion. The former is mostly a problem on 32-bit Windows builds with a 2GB or 4GB virtual memory limit, the latter is mostly a problem on mobile devices that lack swap space.
3. Reputation. Fewer people will complain that Firefox is a memory hog and that Mozilla ignores memory usage."
OK, but the developers of Mozilla are specialists, too. Why not trust them? Or is nnethercote part of the Mozilla dev team? MemShrink will hopefully just be merged into the core?
MemShrink has been running since June 2011 and there have been many improvements in Firefox's memory consumption since then; these have shown up in Firefox 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11.
I have already found one case in Firefox where this is true. FF will load the image data in background tabs, but it won't decode it (e.g. render a JPG) until you switch to that tab. I may be nitpicking but the extra half-second or so bothers me like texture pop-in in a game. So I go to about:config and set image.mem.decodeondraw and image.mem.discardable to false.
