Firefox is too fat

Hunting around a bit I found an excellent little post that explains how to stop this memory vacuum from getting away from you.

1. Simply type about:config in your browser’s address bar.
2. On the resulting screen, right-click and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the input box that appears, type config.trim_on_minimize. Press enter.
4. Select True, and hit enter.

What this does is causes Firefox to dump to your hard drive when you minimize it. Upon re-maximization, it loads back into RAM, but at a fraction of the bloated size it was. As an example, I just checked Firefox’s memory usage. With three tabs open, I was sitting around 80 MB of RAM being used. On minimization, this immediately dropped to under 10 MB. The upon maximization, it went up to 40 MB or so.

As I often have a lot of application open at once, the ability to control their memory usage like this is fantastic. If you use Thunderbird as your mail program, you can make the exact same modification. To get into the About Config, simply navigate to Tools / Options / Advanced / Config Editor.

Light a flame under Firefox’s memory usage ~ Dao By Design