There are many people complaining about the Firefox Memory Bug. Lets get it straight. It’s not a bug, It’s part of the cache feature. This ‘feature’ is how the pages are cached in a tabbed environment. To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigation are re-navigation to pages visited less than 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last five session history entries for each tab. This is a lot of data. If you have a lot of tabs, Firefox’s RAM memory usage can climb dramatically. how to get out of it and increase performance as you navigate the web.
Their are many ways ’secrets’ on how to manipulate settings in “about:config” to drop the memory usage as long as possible and to increase the speed at which Firefox loads sites. Below is the detailed procedure how to do it…
Reduce the amount of RAM Firefox uses for it’s cache feature
Here’s how to fix it:
1. Type “about:config” (no quotes) in the adress bar in the browser.
2. Find “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer”
3. Set it’s value to “0“;(Zero)
Increase the Speed in Which Firefox loads pages
1. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit Enter.
(Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.)
2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 10.
This means it will make 10 requests at once.
3. Lastly, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0“;.(Zero)
This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages faster now.
Optionally (for even faster web browsing) here are some more options for your about:config (you might have to create some of these entries by Right Click –> New– > Interger or String
network.dns.disableIPv6: set “false”
“content.notify.backoffcount”: set “5“; (Five)
“plugin.expose_full_path”: set “true”.
“ui.submenuDelay”: set “0; (zero)
Reduce RAM usage to 10mb when Firefox is minimized:
This little hack will drop Firefox’s RAM usage down to 10 Mb when minimized:
1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter “config.trim_on_minimize”. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.
Some other Small but useful tips and tricks:-
Enable Pipelining
This is one of the most basic things to be done with all versions of firefox. Type about:config in the address bar, double-click network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining so their values are set to true, then double-click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set this to 8.
Reduce content switch threshold
If you don’t move your mouse or touch the keyboard for 0.75 seconds (the content switch threshold), Firefox enters a low frequency interrupt mode, which means its interface becomes less responsive but your page loads more quickly. Reducing the content switch threshold can improve performance.
Type about:config and press [Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.switch.threshold, click OK, enter 250000 (a quarter of a second) and click OK to finish.
Block Flash
Install the Flashblock extension (flashblock.mozdev.org) and it’ll block all Flash applets from loading, so web pages will display much more quickly. And if you discover some Flash content that isn’t entirely useless, just click its placeholder to download and view the applet as normal.
Increase the cache size
As you browse the web so Firefox stores site images and scripts in a local memory cache, where they can be speedily retrieved if you revisit the same page. If you have plenty of RAM (2 GB of more), leave Firefox running all the time and regularly return to pages then you can improve performance by increasing this cache size. Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click anywhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type browser.cache.memory.capacity, click OK, enter 65536 and click OK, then restart your browser to get the new, larger cache.
Render quickly
Large, complex web pages can take a while to download. Firefox doesn’t want to keep you waiting, so by default will display what it’s received so far every 0.12 seconds (the “content notify interval”). While this helps the browser feel snappy, frequent redraws increase the total page load time, so a longer content notify interval will improve performance.
Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click (Apple users ctrl-click) somewhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.notify.interval as your preference name, click OK, enter 500000 (that’s five hundred thousand, not fifty thousand) and click OK again.
Right-click again in the window and select New > Boolean. This time create a value called content.notify.ontimer and set it to True to finish the job.
Search Cloudlet
It is a light-weight, simple to use Firefox extension, which energizes Google and Yahoo searches by adding a tag-cloud to them, there-by helping you to refine your search resulting in more accurate results.
You can adjust the number of keyword tags you want to see below the search box and it automatically re-searches as you click and add them. Search Cloudlet works by looking at the words, sources, locations and other data in the search results to create a weighted tag cloud — the bigger the term the more frequently it pops up in the results.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Search Cloudlet is that didn’t seem to add any overhead to the page load time. In my testing both Google and Yahoo loaded just as fast with Search Cloudlet installed as without. In addition to standard Google and Yahoo searches the extension works on Google News both for keywords and locations. It also works for Google Blog search in a really neat way by adding tags for each author that you can click on to filter which posts come up.
These simple methods will help to make web browsing with Mozilla Firefox 2-3 times faster and easier & I think they are fairly easy to apply. Enjoy! If I find some other good methods and tweaks that help you with better performance on Firefox, I will post them here Or if you know some that would help others, go ahead and share them in comments below.
