Reduce Firefox Memory Usage

One downside of Firefox is its memory usage. This is an old topic and it has always been an issue until now. Once you open multiple tabs or several windows of it, your system starts to slow down. Here’s a screenshot of my Task Manager with three Firefox windows open:

Firefox memory usage

My system only has 512 MB of RAM. The good thing is Firefox has workarounds on this problem. Here are two things I’ve done to solve it.

A. Reduce memory usage when Firefox windows are minimized.
This setting, which only works in Windows, reduces the browser’s memory usage whenever it is minimized to the taskbar.
1. Type “about:config” on the address bar to be able to configure Firefox.
2. Right click on an empty space and select New>Boolean.
3. Type in “config.trim_on_minimize“ and press Enter.
4. Select True. Press Enter and restart Firefox.

B. Specify a fixed cache capacity.
This improves the browser’s performance by determining RAM usage to cache data. Setting this value to zero turns off RAM caching and slows down browsing. The default value “-1” automatically detects the cache size depending on your physical RAM. You may also manually specify the value in kilobytes.
1. Open Firefox configuration page by typing “about:config” on the address bar.
2.Right click on an empty space and select New>Integer.
3. Type in “browser.cache.memory.capacity“, click OK and enter “-1” for its value. Click OK.
4. On the Filter text box, type in “browser.cache.memory.enable” and make sure its value is set to True.
5. Restart Firefox.

Also, be selective with the add-ons (extensions and themes) you install. Pick out the add-ons you know you’ll really use and uninstall unused add-ons.

Searching with Firefox

One of Google Chrome’s feature is to use its address bar as a Google search bar. If you type a search phrase and hit

Mozilla Firefox

Enter, you will be given Google search results. Mozilla Firefox also offers this feature with some tweaks on the browser.

Initially, when you type a search phrase/keyword on the Firefox address bar it would give you an I’m Feeling Lucky Google search result. This means that you’re directed to a website which comes from the top or the number one result of a Google search. But we don’t want that. We just want a regular search result. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open up Firefox.
2. On the address bar, type “about:config” (without the quotes). If you’re presented with a page that says that doing something there might void your warranty, just click the I’ll be careful, I promise button.
3. Type keyword.URL into the Filter textbox.
4. If you’re able to find the keyword.URL string, right-click it and select Modify.
5. Replace the string value with “http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=” (without the quotes) and click OK. Restart Firefox to make sure the change will take place.

Try doing a search on the Firefox address bar. You should be given a Google search results page. By the way, this only works when you’re not behind a proxy server.

What if you use Yahoo! for search? Or Wikipedia? You may also replace the string’s value with Yahoo or Wikipedia’s own search links. But, what if we want to have all those searches done using the address bar? Not just for Google, or Yahoo, or Wikipedia. This is where Smart Keywords search comes in.

Smart Keywords make searching certain websites from the address bar easier. You just type a keyword assigned to a website followed by a search phrase/keyword and you’ll be given a result from the website. You don’t even have to open the website. Just type it in the address bar. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open the website that you use for search.
2. Right click its search field and select “Add a Keyword for this Search…“.
3. Give it a name and then a keyword. Make sure your keyword is easy to remember.
4. Click Add.

Open a new Firefox browser. On the address bar, type in the keyword you created and then a search phrase and press enter. And, that’s it! You may use this feature on any searches you use like Wikipedia, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, YouTube, etc. Just follow the same steps.

And this is one of the many reasons why I use Firefox. 🙂