The beta version of Mozilla's next iteration of its popular Firefox browser - Firefox 15 - is now available for download; bringing along noteworthy speed enhancements for the browser as well as better memory management, thanks to the company's MemShrink effort.

While the forthcoming Firefox 15 version - the "prime time" edition of which will be available from August 28 - will boast a number of new features, the day-to-day browsing will be impacted hugely by the memory improvements, which will help the new browser prevent most of the memory leaks which result from add-ons, including developer favorite, Firebug - the web page-debugging add-on for Firefox.

About the memory improvements coming aboard the Firefox 15 version, Mozilla developer Nicholas Nethercote said in a an official blog post that, for most of the users with add-ons installed, Firebug will bring about a considerable reduction in Firefox's memory consumption, sans any requirement of upgrading those add-ons.

Nethercote further added that for all such users, Firefox 15 is "likely to be faster (sometimes drastically so) and less likely to crash, especially if they have multiple add-ons installed and/or keep Firefox running for a long time between restarts."

Nethercote elaborated that add-on memory leaks are largely an upshot of the so-called "zombie compartments," in which information from web pages is stored and remains after users close a page or depart from it; and added that these compartments will be cleaned out by Firefox 15 to tackle the memory leaks.