I’m a user and a fan of Mozilla’s Firefox browser. The argument that it’s more secure than IE is not one I use any more, as I have also been impressed with Microsoft’s latest browser. I think it comes down to personal preference, and I find the extensions capability of Firefox reason enough to stick with it. One thing that I would change in Firefox in an instant, however, is to fix the memory leak some call a ‘feature’. This is caused by the browser retaining a cache of viewed pages in the system’s memory for speedy recovery. Admittedly this isn’t a bad idea, but as it does this for each tab (and I use a lot of tabs) my current instance of the browser is almost at 500MB of memory usage, which means that a feature that has a minimal chance of actually being useful is actually having an affect on the free resources my machine has.
I’ve no doubt that if this memory is required by an application that Firefox releases it, but I find this has an affect on the browser itself and ultimately causes me to restart the application in order to return to a suitable response time.
According to several sources, you can fix this by restricting the amount of memory Firefox can use, but this has mixed results (some saying this is just a recommended restriction to the application). You can also turn off the caching, but this will almost certainly have an affect on your browsing experience - I’m guessing I use the back button more often than I realise. Another method is to enable a setting in the browser to flush memory whenever the application is minimized. This is the one I have now implemented and hopefully will start seeing a difference.
I have included instructions on implementing each solution below. I’d be interested to hear if anyone has much success. I’m also hopeful that Firefox 3 (due out soon) will address this long-standing issue.
Restrict memory allocation:
- In the address bar type about:config and press return.
- Right click on any value in the list and click New > Integer.
- Type browser.cache.memory.capacity for the preference name and click OK.
- Set the desired value in bytes that you want Firefox to use (for example 32768 bytes is equal to 32 megabytes).
- You will need to restart Firefox for the changes to take affect.
Disable caching:
- In the address bar type about:config and press return.
- Find the preference named browser.cache.memory.enable, right click it and select Toggle.
- The value should change to false.
- You will need to restart Firefox for the changes to take affect.
Trim memory usage on minimize:
- In the address bar type about:config and press return.
- Right click on any value in the list and click New > Boolean.
- Type config.trim_on_minimize for the preference name and click OK.
- Select the value to true.
- You will need to restart Firefox for the changes to take affect.
