If you choose to delete the cache whenever Firefox exits it’s gone, right ? Wrong ! Sure, it got deleted from the hard disk but every file recovery utility, like Recuva, will be able to restore the deleted cache which means that everyone may take a look at each and every website that you visited during your last browsing session.
You could run a free disk space wiper like Eraser every time you close Firefox but that is not very practicable. A far better solution that would also speed up your browsing experience is to use a Ramdisk to store the Firefox cache. Ramdisks, I hear you moan already that they are a relict of the past and not useful anymore. Wrong again..
Ramdisks make sense in many situations, especially if you have enough RAM so that the Ramdisk gets a decent amount of it. As a quick explanation, a Ramdisk is a temporary disk in your RAM. It has a drive letter and behaves like any hard drive or USB device that is connected to your computer.
The benefit is that it is faster than a hard drive because RAM is faster than hard drives and that everything that gets written to it will be gone once you restart the computer.
I’m going to explain how to create a Ramdisk and set the directory of the Firefox cache to it to increase security and speed. First, download the file Ramdisk.sys and extract it to your computer. Start the application ramdisk.exe afterwards.
Click on the left button Install Ramdisk and wait a few seconds. All other options should become active afterwards. Begin by selecting a size (of your RAM) for the Ramdisk. I would not use more than 50% of your RAM for the Ramdisk, I’m using 25% which translates to 512 Megabytes of RAM for the Ramdisk.
Select a drive letter afterwards, pick one from the end to avoid conflicts. Keep the Fixed Media Entry and click on OK. This should initialize the Ramdisk. Check to see if the new drive letter is available in My Computer.
Now open Firefox and enter about:config in the address bar. Filter for the string browser.cache.disk.parent_directory. If it is not found create it by right-clicking the empty space and selecting New > String from the menu. Paste the above string into the form and enter the value driveletter:\\directory.
My Ramdisk has been created with the drive letter Z:\ which means that I used the value z:\\temp\\ for the Firefox cache. Please note that you have to use double “\\” and not single “\”.
Restart Firefox after creating the new entry and visit some websites. Now head over to your Ramdisk and check if the cache is filling with the files of those websites. If you followed this instruction it should. The cache will be deleted once you reboot or shut down your system.
Related posts:
Use a Ramdisk to speed up ApplicationsMoving The Firefox Disk Cache To Another Drive
Firefox: 55 Add-Ons To Increase Your Security And Privacy
Increase Responsiveness of Firefox
Firefox Cache It Add-on
17 Responses to “Use a Ramdisk to increase Firefox security”
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Download link doesn’t work. When I click on it, I get:
User is not allowed to use direct links.
Please email support@box.net for support
That’s strange because I can download the file without difficulties. Try this alternate download link http://rapidshare.com/files/76624404/ramdisk.zip.html
Much easier and safer way to run your browser is to use Sandboxie and Returnil.
http://www.sandboxie.com/
http://www.returnilvirtualsystem.com/
The link worked fine with me. But hey, thanks for reminding me. I used to use ramdisks. Than the harddisk requirements got too large and I forgot all about ramdisks. Now ram is getting up to 4 gigs, time to use ramdisks again.
Just took a look at Sandboxie. Interesting. But ramdisks are inherently safer. It permanently goes away into thin air. It never touch the harddisk at all. I used to use ramdisks to play CIV I back in the old days. MIS never caught on :)
512 megabytes of RAM being set aside for the Firefox cache is ridiculously huge. Why have most of it sitting aside doing when it could be unallocated and being used for system cache (making the whole computer faster)?
50 megabytes is all you need. The cache is there for storing HTML and images that you download within the course of your web browsing, so even 50 megabytes is generous.
Try putting FireFox Portable
(www.portableapps.com) on the RAM-drive .
Man, does that speed up load-times ..
My goal was to capture video file in cache 45 minutes long and 90 MB size. The file in cache named 45FD74EDd01 was growing to 65520 MB and stopped growing at this size. I coped it to other folder, renamed by adding “.flv” and could see part of video only.
How can I increase this file to e.g. 100 MB? What command in about:config?
In light of this, in ram disc ain’t so secure…
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/technology/22chip.html
Why would you bother with the ramdisk – why not disable the browser.cache.disk ,this would force firefox to store the cache in ram . that is how protable firefox does it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox,_Portable_Edition
http://technicaltricks.blogspot.com/2008/02/optimize-firefox-reduce-memory-leakage.html
Been playing with the ramdisk and I think it can actually compliment Sandboxie in setting Sandboxie’s storage folder as the ramdrive.
Using the ramdisk does seem to speed things up while Sandboxie provides excellent security.
There is no need to change FF’s cache path as Sandboxie caches everything into the ramdisk.
It doesn’t work with Xp64, do you have à 64bits version
And if you want to be really paranoid, you can take your newly created harddrive and encrypt it with open source TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org) :P
for x64 ramdisk there is a solution described here http://www.sevenforums.com/software/3117-i-cant-install-cenatek-ramdisk.html
it works for me under windows 7 x64. if you follow the instruction there, please notice that RamdiskVE.exe (the configuration utility) will report error creating ramdisk but after reboot you will have a ramdisk with your parameters.
My RamDisk has defaulted to FAT 16 file system. Can this be changed to NTFS? Have read a previous list of instructions which are not very easy to follow.