MemChaser 0.2 released

Exactly one month after we have released our initial version of MemChaser, version 0.2 has been made publicly available. You can install the add-on as usual from addons.mozilla.org or if it is already installed, simply check for updates within the Add-ons Manager.

A couple of subtle changes have been made which will give a better experience for users. So we have combined the formerly two widgets in the Add-on bar into a single one to prevent other extensions from inserting their widgets in-between. At the same time the width has been reduced to not waste too much space (keep in mind that we are still blocked on a SDK bug which doesn’t let the widget size adapt to the content length dynamically).

Given the recent landing of the incremental garbage collector in Nightly builds of Firefox we had to do some extra unplanned updates to support this new feature. When you are running a Nightly build and an incremental GC happens, the ‘GC‘ label will be replaced with ‘iGC‘.

Further we have improved the parsing of the GC/CC console messages to allow us to add more interested entries dynamically. So this time we have added the reason and type (global or compartmental) for a GC, and the number of collected entries from the cycle collector. All three will be written together with all the other data to the log file and are not visible in the add-on bar.

As reported by an user MemChaser v0.1.1 was affected by some memory leaks which were caused by the Add-on SDK 1.4. Given the tireless efforts of the SDK devs nearly all of those leaks (except for widgets) have been fixed in version 1.5, which has been recently released and is now used by MemChaser 0.2.

Beside all those visible changes we also made some improvements to our development process. So we have added the Add-on SDK as a submodule to our own repository on Github. Also to get more traction we made the decision to move the MemChaser repository to the Mozilla account. And last but not least we implemented the Travis CI integration to get our code automatically tested with each check-in.

If you are interested in further information about the changes feel free to check our list of issues for 0.2.

We would also like to welcome everyone who has interests to help us with coding, ui work, or documentation. There are a lot of features we want to implement and need talented people for. Stop by on one of our channels and get in contact with us.