Put your Firefox on Diet :Read on

So lot of you have been saying Mozilla Firefox takes too much RAM especially the latest in 2 series i.e. 2.0.0.11

Well, here are some tips for those who wanna reduce FF's RAM consumption.

Note: If you have 2 GB RAM then its not needed although can be useful when running lot of programs.

1)Limit RAM usage.
If Firefox takes up too much memory on your computer, you can limit the amount of RAM it is allowed to use. Again, go to about:config, filter “browser.cache” and select “browser.cache.disk.capacity”. It’s set to 50000, but you can lower it, depending on how much memory you have. Try 15000 if you have between 512MB and 1GB ram.

Edited: Currently This doesnt practically improve performance for those with More than 1.5 GB RAM... Try changing the Value > 50000 if u have too much RAM to waste
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2) Reduce RAM usage further for when Firefox is minimized.
This setting will move Firefox to your hard drive when you minimize it, taking up much less memory. And there is no noticeable difference in speed when you restore Firefox, so it’s definitely worth a go. Again, go to about:config, right-click anywhere and select New-> Boolean. Name it “config.trim_on_minimize” and set it to TRUE. You have to restart Firefox for these settings to take effect.

Now Some other cool tips to improve your Firefox experience

3) Move or remove the close tab button.
Do you accidentally click on the close button of Firefox’s tabs? You can move them or remove them, again through about:config. Edit the preference for “browser.tabs.closeButtons”. Here are the meanings of each value:

* 0: Display a close button on the active tab only
* 1: (Default) Display close buttons on all tabs
* 2: Don’t display any close buttons
* 3: Display a single close button at the end of the tab bar (Firefox 1.x behavior)

4) Create a user.js file.
Another way to customize Firefox, creating a user.js file can really speed up your browsing. You’ll need to create a text file named user.js in your profile folder (see this to find out where the profile folder is) and see this example user.js file that you can modify. Created by techlifeweb.com, this example explains some of the things you can do in its comments.

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5) about:config
The true power user’s tool, about.config isn’t something to mess with if you don’t know what a setting does. You can get to the main configuration screen by putting about:config in the browser’s address bar. See Mozillazine’s about:config tips and screenshots.

6) Add a keyword for a bookmark.
Go to your bookmarks much faster by giving them keywords. Right-click the bookmark and then select Properties. Put a short keyword in the keyword field, save it, and now you can type that keyword in the address bar and it will go to that bookmark.

7) Speed up Firefox.
If you have a broadband connection (and most of us do), you can use pipelining to speed up your page loads. This allows Firefox to load multiple things on a page at once, instead of one at a time (by default, it’s optimized for dialup connections). Here’s how:

* Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Type “network.http” in the filter field, and change the following settings (double-click on them to change them):
* Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
* Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
* Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to a number like 30. This will allow it to make 30 requests at once.
* Also, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0?. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

8) Mouse shortcuts.
Sometimes you’re already using your mouse and it’s easier to use a mouse shortcut than to go back to the keyboard. Master these cool ones:

* Middle click on link (opens in new tab)
* Shift-scroll down (previous page)
* Shift-scroll up (next page)
* Ctrl-scroll up (decrease text size)
* Ctrl-scroll down (increase text size)
* Middle click on a tab (closes tab)

9) Delete items from address bar history.
Firefox’s ability to automatically show previous URLs you’ve visited, as you type, in the address bar’s drop-down history menu is very cool. But sometimes you just don’t want those URLs to show up (I won’t ask why). Go to the address bar (Ctrl-L), start typing an address, and the drop-down menu will appear with the URLs of pages you’ve visited with those letters in them. Use the down-arrow to go down to an address you want to delete, and press the Delete key to make it disappear.

10) More screen space.
Make your icons small. Go to View - Toolbars - Customize and check the “Use small icons” box.

11) Smart keywords.
If there’s a search you use a lot (let’s say IMDB.com’s people search), this is an awesome tool that not many people use. Right-click on the search box, select “Add a Keyword for this search”, give the keyword a name and an easy-to-type and easy-to-remember shortcut name (let’s say “actor”) and save it. Now, when you want to do an actor search, go to Firefox’s address bar, type “actor” and the name of the actor and press return. Instant search! You can do this with any search box.

12)Auto-complete
This is another keyboard shortcut, but it’s not commonly known and very useful. Go to the address bar (Control-L) and type the name of the site without the “www” or the “.com”. Let’s say “google”. Then press Control-Enter, and it will automatically fill in the “www” and the “.com” and take you there - like magic! For .net addresses, press Shift-Enter, and for .org addresses, press Control-Shift-Enter

Enjoy!
Brought to you by:
Tushar a.k.a nocturnal310,
Singapore

 

For step 1, you sure it's not browser.cache.memory.capacity? Rather than disk.capacity?

Thanks.

Oh. I noticed something now, the initial minimize is weird. It's like the screen does some really weird ass flashing and then minimizes. It's hard to explain, it's like a clear window tries to go out of my screen but then recedes back in. But after the first initial minimize in a session it doesn't do it again. But if I close FF and open it and try it again, it will do it.... just a heads up. Not really a biggie or anything but..

 

Nice guide! I noticed you mentioned the ctrl+L shortcut to go to the address bar, which I use all the time. ctrl-K goes to the search bar at top. I use that quite frequently also. It might be worth mentioning.

 

thanks. tried it. I use the addon permatabs which lets you right click a tab and select a funciton which prevents it from being closed at all. it allows me to always have gmail open, even as soon as I open firefox.

 

Yea thanks for the useful tips.

 

thanks Tushar.....Rep +

The smart keywords tip is nice !!

 

Yes, i ve known all that for quite some time but many of my friends didnt know so i thot of putting it anyway.

The FF3 beta 2 is much lighter on resources btw.

 

Actually it is browser.cache.memory.enable NOT browser.cache.memory.capacity ...it can be enabled or disabled ..its boolean not an integer type

 

Um.

Please clarify dude.

Step one you talk about:
“browser.cache.disk.capacity”

Is it DISK or MEMORY?

What you going on about in this post? This post seems say you goofed up step 1? Do clarify what you mean please, as it is sort of important.

 

its DISK as u can see clearly..it reduces the default space firefox utilizes ....basically u optimize Firefox for memory consumption......did u even try going to about:config? theres no entry such as "browser.cache.memory.capacity" ..

 

Hey thanks. I followed your instrustions, and Firefox loads much faster, everything is much better.

 

No, I can't see clearly.

Well, I guess I got some super duper h4X version of firefox.

 

I see that too, and seems like the first step about optimizing memory doesn't work.

 

the disk cache capacity integer referred to in step one does NOTHING to change the ram usage of firefox.
It reduces the amount of HARD DRIVE space used by the FF cache file, which is used to store temp copies of the webpages you visit.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.disk.capacity

browser.cache.memory.capacity is a valid integer switch. Here's what it does;
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.memory.capacity

 

I have read on NBR that on_minimize (releasing memory) does not work in Vista. I have had that in my FF for some time and it worked fine in XP but now it does nothing in Vista.

 

Thanks for tip #9. I've always wondered how that could be done.

 

Thanks for the tips

 

On my firefox it is Missing!...which version are u using?

 

one has to manually enter this value if need to be changed, regardless of version. Many default values in FF will not be inside about:config

cheers ...

 

Great Thread!!!

I especially like the advanced search field function... didn't know bout that! makes searchin a fun activity!

i'd like to add a few things...
this great link shows a real nice overview of firefox's shortcuts: http://lesliefranke.com/files/reference/firefoxcheatsheet.html

also if you use the "go back one page" button frequently you can change the value of 'browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers'
it's default is '-1' which allocates memory dedicated to keeping websites you just visited. with this value it goes up to a maximum of 8 pages(if you have 1GiB of Ram or more), that is for all the tabs you have open not for each tab! you can put in something like 15 or whatever as well to keep more recently visited sites in memory.
if you are keen on lowering ram usage set this value to '0'

 

thanks for the info. captainpoch!

btw thanks also for bringing the thread back to life.

 

With release of Firefox 3 ..the use of this article will change.

and i ll have to update it .

Waiting for release now!

 

I can't believe I've never come across this thread before today. It was a rush of information. There was a lot that I could do with FF that I had no idea existed.

 

I've seen this part many times over the internet. It's not exactly a good thing. This will increase CPU usage a lot as well as pipelining is not compatible with all servers, giving you errors that you may attribute to the server rather than your own configuration. If you want to speed up firefox, use the FasterFox extension that lets you control these settings easier.

Also changing the initial paint delay to 0 actually slows down Firefox because it doesn't wait for a reasonable amount of HTML is loaded before rendering. It may be perceptably 'faster' because you see the page much sooner, but Firefox has to render the page many times more than usual, eating CPU and adding to the total display time on large pages.

Lastly, a few server admins won't appreciate many consecutive/same time requests and may ban you for it.