Reducing the memory consumption of images in Mozilla and Firefox

[mandy]

For Firefox, keeping the compressed, as-downloaded images in the client could reduce memory consumption a lot. 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.

For the proof-of-concept program, we reduced the cumulative memory usage from 108063 KB to 19588 KB — that is, a factor of 5.5.

full article: http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/new...moz-images