I hate to admit this but sometimes I really suspect the slowness of my browsing experience comes from heavy memory usage by my Firefox, and there is nothing to replace good-ol-firefox. I need to open too many tabs and cannot afford buggy Internet Explorer. Stumbled upon Techbuzz, Thilaks show a way how reduce memory usage in Mozilla Firefox. I’ve tried it and think it helps a lot.
How to reduce memory usage in Mozilla Firefox
Type about:config in the Firefox address bar
Search for browser.sessionhistory.max_entries
Double click on the value 50, change it to something lower, 5 should be good.
What this means?
Averagely we surf less than 5 of the websites we previously surfed before, there is no need to use up that much memory (which is 50 by default).

<removed>

This was a spam post but I'm leaving it up because it might be useful.

removed the spam and banned the poster of course

BTW
I am testing it to see if it reduces the usual ~500Mb mine runs at to something a little more realistic

Well it's been just over 1 hour and usually it would be running in the mid 400M range by now and slowing down severely. and I would be restarting FF.

Running at a history setting of 10 and it's running at ~200M and still responsive.

If you have downloaded many addons and some of them are unnecessary then delete those one which save memory!

Firefox eats computer resources badly... I also use Opera and it uses less CPU/memory than FF.

"Make the switch to Firefox – the faster, safer, smarter way to browse the Web." Yeah, right

Just to bring this upto date.

It has made some difference to the memory FF uses for me. Not enormous but it has reduced the number of restarts I do in an average day.

Interesting. I didn't even know about the about:config. I'm trying what you did, Chris: setting it to 10.

Neither did I


Imagine, a spammer actually doing something useful now there's a first!

You guys aren't hard-core FF users then I've known about the about:config from the early days.

Sometimes it hangs up the screen for too long and that is really annoying. I just tried out opera and I think it offers the functionality similar like FF.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Neither did I


Imagine, a spammer actually doing something useful now there's a first!

Well, spammers really do something useful SOMETIMES. Years ago I was spammed with some URLs. One of them was interesting for me, so I have decided to take a look. It was some kind of money-making service, I have registered without any hope (just for dun), but I continue to make $1500-2000 per month from that site while DOING NOTHING

For high end users who want to reduce bandwidth, along with memory consumption:

about:config -> network.prefetch-next -> set to false.

This prevents FF from downloading from all the links on your pages. This is designed to speed up browsing but can cost you in bandwidth. For heavy users, especially heavy message board users, these links can build up fast (i.e. signatures). Cache, memory and bandwidth.

You can also try the plugin Cache Status. I just started using it today but it's helped me clear my cache very quickly and has been nice in clearing memory and hard drive cache independently. Instant RAM space without closing FF.