Firefox tutorials

Mozilla Firefox Memory Tweaks

If you are using Firefox with its default settings there is a high probability that its causing a few issues with your RAM (Memory), using to much memory and not giving it back! Causing Firefox to not respond or crash, and causing other programs to function slower because Firefox is being selfish with your RAM (Memory).
The tutorials below are for tweaking Firefox memory preferences with about:config to improve overall performance.

Some people think the memory issues with Firefox are memory leaks, others think they are features that Firefox offers you, what ever the case some will want to keep Firefox the way that it is (Default) others will want to change things (Tweak/optimize).
I will go into more detail on the tweaks below on there own pages but you will get a brief description here, because most of the tweaks that you will be preforming will vary from person to person, based on your personal preferences and browsing habits.

Important Before performing any of the about:config tweaks below you should back-up Firefox you can either backup manually or by using MozBackup.

Overview of the Memory Tweaks

To find out more on the below Tweaks, or to follow the tutorials click on the title of the tweak you are interested in.

config.trim_on_minimize
This Tweak will make Firefox release the RAM when minimized by storing the information in RAM to your hard drive, once you maximize again the information on you hard drive is loaded back into RAM but will use less RAM then before you minimized. Like a little refresh, if you will.

browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
This Tweak will stop Firefox Caching history (pages you have visited in the past) pages for the 'Back' button, this may cause pages to load slightly slower when 'Going Back' but will use less RAM, you shouldn't really notice a difference with most sites.

browser.cache.memory.enable
For this Tweak there are two settings on and off
On will use more memory but should load pages slightly faster. Off will not cache pages therefor using less memory but making page loads slightly slower, again shouldn't really be noticeable on most sites.

browser.cache.memory.capacity
This Preference sets the amount of Memory to put aside to use for caching pages, lowering the value will cause less memory to be used but will slightly increase the load time of previously visited pages.