Federico Mena-Quintero has a proposal for reducing memory usage by Firefox, by keeping compressed images in memory, instead of uncompressed images. According to Mena-Quintero, “My program is a proof of concept and doesn’t do anything fancy to reduce the little jerkiness that results from uncompressing the images on the fly. Firefox could get much fancier; it could probably uncompress the images that are adjacent to the viewable area, in advance, while you are still reading what is in the viewable area. This would be equivalent to read-ahead for hard disks.”
