How to Reduce Firefox Memory Usage and Improve Its Speed

As you all know , one of the major drawbacks of firefox is memory handling . Firefox is a well known browser a major competitor to Internet Explorer . The problem with firefox is , once you open many windows and close them , and you keep doing that over and over again , the cache does not get wiped off automatically of all the closed pages.This increase its memory usage and thereby causing either your whole system to kinda slow down or firefox only to act a little wierd or crash often . Although recently with firefox 3 the situation is much under control although there is still some memory issues and firefox still is one of those browsers which uses a lot of memory especially when you have a lot of windows open . So for a person like me who uses the browser extensively it is a major problem . But the following few tips seem to make this a lot more better . So here's what you could do to improve firefox speed and reduce its memory usage :



Firstly , the best method is switching to the latest Firefox 3 , be it windows or linux or whatever, firefox 3 is way better in terms of speed and reliability and memory usage compared to firefox 2, it gets worse with the previous versions. Now onto the other tweaks :

1)Reduce Memory Utilization When Firefox Is Minimized
THis is something that i found very useful . SO whenever you minimize any firefox window , firefox would allow your operating system to use the available free memory , thereby reducing memory utilization in firefox . Here's how this is done :
Step 1 : Open firefox and type about:config in the address bar and press enter
Step 2 : Right click and click on New->Boolean
Step 3 : Type config.trim_on_minimize in the pop-up box and hit Enter
Step 4 : Select TRUE and hit enter
Step 5 : Restart firefox

2)Disable Firefox Cache
This will tell firefox not to cache any website ,firefox usually stores the webpage to make pages load faster thus increasing the cache space available and thereby utilizing more memory. By default its value is set to -1 we could change that to a value more suited by us
Step 1 : Open firefox and type about:config in the address bar and press enter
Step 2 : In the filter type browser.cache.memory.enable and set it to TRUE
Step 3 : Right Click and choose New->Integer and type browser.cache.memory.capacity
Step 4 : Now for a value you could refer this table . Set the value based on your RAM . Do not set it to 0 as it causes certain problems in firefox .

RAM - VALUE ( CACHE MEMORY IN KB )
32MB - 2048
64MB - 4096
128MB - 6144
256MB - 10240
512MB - 14336
1GB - 18432
2GB - 24576
4GB AND UP - 30720

Step 5 : Restart Firefox

3)Limit Pages Stored In Memory
Firefox by default stores most visited pages to your memory . Now this isnt required and it does utilize quite a lot of memory. So here's how you limit number of pages stored in memory :
Step 1 : Open firefox and type about:config in the address bar and press enter
Step 2 : In the filter type browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
Step 3 : Now for a value you could refer this table . Set the value based on your RAM . You may set it to 0 if you dont want firefox to store any pages

RAM - VALUE ( NO OF PAGES )
32MB - 0
64MB - 1
128MB - 2
256MB - 3
512MB - 5
1GB - 8
2GB - 8
4GB - 8

Step 4 : Restart Firefox

Hope these help in making your firefox much more efficient and faster !!

MY FIREFOX MEMORY USAGE BEFORE :
This was a screenshot i took a few weeks back of the memory usage of firefox when it had quite a few windows open .