Use a Ramdisk to increase Firefox security

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.