Speed Up Firefox: How To Reduce RAM Usage

If you are tired to see how your computer starts to slow down after you’ve been using Firefox for a while, I’m going to teach you how to reduce the amount of memory that Firefox is allowed to use for caching.

You can also set Firefox to ensure that when you minimize it, Firefox will move to your hard drive, and as a result it will take up less than 10MB of memory while minimized.

Photo Credit: Marin Myftiu – Edited By Nicolo’ Canali De Rossi

Here’s how you do it:

• Go to the address bar on your Firefox browser and write about:config
• Search “browser.cache and select browser.cache.disk.capacity” in the filter.
• Try to set 20000 if you have between 512Mb and 1GB of Ram. If you have less than 512Mb then reduce to 10000. (By default it’s usually set to 50000. This value could be lowered depending on how much ram you have.)

• To reduce your Ram consumption when Firefox is minimized, by simply sending Firefox back to the hard disk, just type about:config in the address bar: right click anywhere and select New>>Boolean. Name it config.trim_on_minimize and set it’s value to TRUE.

Restart Firefox.

Now your Firefox will be faster and will consume less RAM than before.