I was researching a Firefox hack that would reduce the amount of memory Firefox consumed when it occurred to me that my Firefox browser was using way more memory than the Firefox of a friend who told me about the hack. It did use about 55 Megabytes of RAM without any website loaded while the version of my friend did only use 40 Megabytes.
I was puzzled at first but soon realized that my friend was not using many extensions while my version of Firefox was loaded with three toolbars and countless extensions. And so my little experiment began. I uninstalled two of the three toolbars, removed any extension that I did not needed that badly and restarted Firefox afterwards.
The result was a reduction to 41 Megabytes from 55 Megabytes which was more than I hoped for. I’m pretty confident that I could reduce that number even further if I would uninstall the last toolbar as well and get rid of the ten extensions that I have still installed.
I will not do it though because some of the extensions add so much functionality and security to Firefox that I have to keep using them.
About the memory hack that I was talking about in the beginning. It was about disabling the function to store websites that you have visited in memory to be able to access them faster using the back button. To disable that function you enter about:config in the address bar and search for the string browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers and set it to 0.
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This is great news for those who have a box which is low on memory. Though the newer generation of machines which is able to run stuff like Vista, 15mb is next to nothing. My machine has 2GB, which is reasonable if you look at the memory prices these days, 15MB of RAM is less than 1% and in the bigger picture my extensions will hardly influence how my machine runs.
I maybe a bit old fashioned when it comes to RAM ;) I like to reduce memory consumption even though I have 2 Gigabytes as well.
Another way to reduce firefox memory effectively is using “Firefox Ultimate Optimizer”. It work find for me, may be you guys should try it. And GHack, thx for the tip.
I only have one extension on my ff3 beta 1 and still eating 66k to 80k..
Same here, over 60 extensions and 53MB at start (no page loaded). But I wish not to remove whatever extension, and on another hand setting browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to 0, though I load mainly pages in new tabs, may be bothering sometimes: I’ve set that value to 4 (instead of 8 as default for 1Mb RAM). What I do to recover memory if I really get too high is to simply minimize FF with config.trim_on_minimize set to true : radical!
@exglade, “Firefox Ultimate Optimizer” seems to contain a sniffer. KIS 7 has confirmed this on download. What a pity!