Reduce memory consumption in firefox

[Anuj Dhawan]

I've been using many explorers, for example, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera and although Mozilla Firefox is one of the best and can be customized easily, however, there is one problem with Firefox – it consumes too much memory.

These days, computers or laptops are equipped with high RAM, however, if you have a computer with less than 1GB RAM then it can easily give you computer blues. If you want to reduce the memory consumption of Mozilla Firefox or set a limit to how much memory it can claim, then you can follow these simple instructions

1. Open Mozilla Firefox browser.
2. Type in - "about:config" in the Firefox address bar and press Enter. This will show a warning message, "Here be dragons!". Click on the "I’ll be careful, I promise" button to proceed.
3. Type- "cache.memory" in the Search field to narrow down the listing to the settings that we are looking for.
4. If you want to disable Firefox from storing the cache into the memory, then find the setting named "browser.cache.memory.enable" and set its value to false.
5. If you do not want to stop Firefox from storing cache into the physical memory, then you can reduce the cache store limit. In order to do this, find a setting named "browser.cache.memory_limit" and set its value to "4096". The value of this setting is the number of maximum kilobytes of RAM that Firefox will use for storing cache. You have to restart Firefox, for the settings to take effect.
6. Even though you can stop Firefox from storing cache in the memory to reduce memory consumption, but there are other things like Firefox program memory, extensions and number of tabs that have to be stored in the physical memory. So do not expect magic to happen, Firefox will still continue to consume around 200MB of your RAM.

Courtesy: Wiki, google etc.