Firefox Tips and Tweaks

Is Firefox eating up all your memory? If yes, then its probably because you are a frequent heavy tabbed Firefox power user with lots of addons and self made customization. Then here are some tips to customize your Firefox and minimize its memory load on your CPU. These tips work really great and a few of these small tweaks can get you impressive results.

Gone are the days of Netscape and I Explorer. Today Firefox is the most preferred browser by computer techno s because of its flexibility and customization. But the price to these added advantages is massive memory and processor usage. Back in days Firefox was popular for its tabbed browsing and customization not available with other browsers. But today Firefox has grown into a powerful browser with lots of addons and other popular features in demand to the peoples web usage patterns. The downside of all these things is the high amount of memory usage. But if tackled properly the memory usage of Firefox can be effectively managed in compliance to the available system resources.





Tips and Tweaks for Firefox effective Memory Management

1) Restart Firefox

This is the dumbest and the best of all the tips. Increase in the Firefox memory usage can be due to continued usage of the browser with many tabs. If you think that the memory usage of Firefox is exceeding the limits then just close the unwanted tabs and restart the browser. Here you can use the Firefox Session Manager feature to revert back to the previous state.



2) Minimize memory usage upon Firefox Minimize

There is a tweak that you can perform on the internal settings of the Firefox browser where it allows one to minimize the memory usage of Firefox when you minimize the Firefox window. For this you will have to add a new Boolean Variable with name 'config.trim_on_minimize' and set it 'true' using the 'about:config' interface of Firefox. By adding this preference Firefox reduces the memory usage of Firefox when we minimize it, freeing memory for other computer tasks and then slowly increases it corresponding to the available memory.

Procedure:
In a new tab enter 'about:config' in the location bar, without the quotes and press enter. You will reach a page where you can view and modify the User Preferences which are mostly set to default.

Enter a new value by Right Clicking and selecting New -> Boolean. In the next step enter the preference name as 'config.trim_on_minimize', without the quotes and set its value to ' true'. You will have to restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.





















3) Fix the size of Firefox Memory Cache

In Firefox when media files(like images) are loaded they are automatically cached to avoid the overhead of decoding and uncompressing for later redisplay. For this purpose Firefox does not use a fixed memory cache size but it varies depending up on the available system memory. By lowering this value one can reduce the memory usage by a few MB.

Note: If you regularly browse pages with lot of multimedia its better to leave this field to the default state.

Procedure:

Go to the 'about:config' page and go to the 'browser.cache.memory.enable' entry and set it to 'true'. If the entry is not available then create the same entry of type 'Boolean' and name 'browser.cache.memory.enable' and set it to 'true'.
Now enter a new entry of type 'Integer' and name it 'browser.cache.memory.capacity' and enter its value as per following recommendation.

Physical Ram Default Size(KB) Recommended Size(KB)
128 MB..................... 6144............................. 4096
256 MB.....................10240............................4096
512 MB.....................14336.............................6144 or 8192
1 GB..........................18432.............................10240 or 14336

Confirm that the entry is correct. The finally setting looks like this and it may vary according to your preference





Note: If you are a user who woks with lots of images then its advised to set it to default size. To restore to the default settings chance its value to '-1', with out the quotes.
You can check your current Memory Cache usage by typing 'about:cache?device=memory' in the Location bar and hitting 'Enter'.


4) Periodically Clear Download History

Firefox saves the list of all downloaded items and if you use frequently download using Firefox then its advised to uncheck the "Remember what I've downloaded" in the Tools -> Options -> Privacy, unless you need to keep track of your downloaded files.











5) Increase System's Virtual Memory

You can increase the size of the systems virtual Memory and there by increasing the Firefox performance.


6) Plugin to watch Firefox Memory usage

You can use the lightweight 'StatusbarEx' plugin that can be used to display important system information like System Memory Usage, Firefox Memory usage, Network Speed etc., on the browsers 'Status Bar'.











You can download and add the addon from here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/addon/3271


7) Keep track of your Plugins

Plugins are a wonderful feature available to the Firefox users but they can drastically increase the memory usage of Firefox even when the are not being used. Keep a track of all the plugins installed in your Firefox and uninstall any unused plugins. Its very important to keep the plugins updated for best memory management and performance.