Is your Firefox eating alot of your system resources? Most users won’t have any significant performance decreases caused by Firefox. For those that do, you have the ability to make changes, changes that can increase the overall memory efficiency of Firefox and hopefully put a smile back on your face.

Things to think about

Flash is definitely the memory devil. Pages utilizing numerous flash elements, animations and fancy-effects caused by such objects munch on memory like crazy. Consider flash objects to be like your silly goldfish, if there is food, it will eat until it dies. If you leave your browser open with numerous tabs open, the memory will increase over time, until, plop. Your browser dies and must be restarted.

Therefore, some things to think about. The more resources your computer system has to utilize, the more Firefox will potentially try to eat up. However, if you are viewing pages with large amounts of data, such as the entire 1994 Sports Almanac on one page, look forward to some horrid memory issues. If your computer is using a substantially larger portion of your resources than you think necessary, you might have an issue.

Close the application

An easy method for clearing up the mysterious memory munching mongral is to cease its operation. You got it, turn that puppy off. Simply close Firefox and re-open it. It will be using less memory than it was during its previous execution, though it will eventually get right back to where it was.

Session Manager for Firefox, is an extension that automatically stores your current state of operation and allows users to spawn firefox with the stored session information following an unexpected halt. You can manually save a session for future recall or just allow it to automatically do its thing.

Extensions, plugins, themes, ETC

Despite the beauty, functionality and purpose, these objects create more memory leaks in Firefox than anything else. If you find yourself not using an Extensions functionality and features, shut if off. Uninstall any theme or plugin that you don’t absolutely deem necessary. These items can quickly reduce memory usage and honestly, save tons of headaches.

I was using 7 extensions for firefox, with no theme at all and my browser would sit, three tabs open, my website, admin panel and netvibes.. 200MB utilization. Seemed a bit odd. Got rid of the extensions I didn’t need and bam… back to a reasonable number, 50mb.

MozillaZine has a great set of resources and a problematic extensions list for Firefox. The list shows extension-specific conflicts and information.

Remember my modest vent about Flash objects? Mozillazine’s knowledgebase has information related to reducing flash memory usage too.

Memory leaks and what-not

Curious what is eating away your memory in Firefox? In a browser window type about:cache?device=memory. The page, once loaded will display detailed memory usage and give you an insight as to what can be freed up.

Firefox developers have also created a few virtual memory settings in Windows

  • Modify about:config settings
  • Get advanced information through extensions and plugins (temporarily install to debug)

    • I definitely recommend reading the knowledge base at mozillazine. They have some very detailed information, outlining everything mentioned in my article as well. I was frustrated with my Firefox eating resources, hopefully this will give a little insight as to how I corrected my issue and you could help yours. Best of luck!