Last updated on June 9th, 2015 at 05:27 pm
Is Your Firefox installation running slowly?
Ours was – and after checking that all our plugins + addons were up to date, we decided to start trimming some of the fat in the configuration. Firefox is installed with some very lenient settings – and those settings means that the browser can grab a lot of memory from your computer- far more memory and you might like it to.
So – we dove under the hood and trimmed some settings back.
To get under the hood – enter ‘about:config’ in the address bar – then, when presented with the ‘you might break your warranty’ warning (what warranty?!?) – click “I’ll be careful, I promise” to continue…
Now – change the following settings:
Reduces number of recently visited pages stored in memory
- Enter browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers in the Filter field.
- One preference will appear below.
- Right click on it and select Modify.
- Default value is -1 which determines number of pages based on RAM. Change it to a lower value such as 2-3 (means two or three pages will be stored).
- Press OK.
Swap memory from RAM to hard disk when minimized:
- Right click on the empty space below Preference Name.
- Select Boolean from the New option (Right Click > New > Boolean)
- Enter preference name as config.trim_on_minimize
- Set it to True.
Note: This fix not actually reduces memory usage. It swaps memory from RAM to your hard disk. So, you’ll notice a serious drop in Firefox memory usage when you minimize your active browser windows.
Reduce hard drive space used for cache:
- Enter browser.cache.disk.capacity in the Filter field.
- One preference will appear below.
- Change the default value with a lower positive integer. Say 4096.
- Press OK.
Reduce max number of pages in your session history:
- Enter browser.sessionhistory.max_entries in the Filter field.
- One preference will appear below.
- Default value for the integer is 50. Change it to a lower value. Say 5.
- Press OK.
Reduce maximum number of results in awesome bar:
- Enter browser.urlbar.maxRichResults in the Filter field.
- One preference will appear below.
- Default value for the integer is 16. Change it to a lower value. Say 6.
- Press OK.
Reduce number of closed tabs you can undo:
- Enter browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo in the Filter field.
- One preference will appear below.
- Default value for the integer is 10. Change it to a lower value. Say 5.
- Press OK.
Reduce number of closed windows you can undo:
- Enter browser.sessionstore.max_windows_undo in the Filter field.
- One preference will appear below.
- Default value for the integer is 3. Change it to a lower value. Say 1.
- Press OK.
Also see: How To Update Your Firefox Plugins