Reduce Firefox memory usage
Here's a trick to help reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox when it is minimized. It only works for Firefox on Windows. But when you use this it'll free up almost all of the memory used by Firefox when it is in the minimized state.
Go to the address bar in Firefox and enter about:config
If you are using Firefox 3, you may get a warning. Just skip it.
Once you get shown all of the preferences right-click in the main part of the page and select New > Boolean.
Enter the name as config.trim_on_minimize
It'll then create the preference and the value will be set to false. Double-click on the entry and the value will toggle to true.
You need to restart Firefox for the change to take effect. But once you do Firefox will give up almost all of it's physical memory when it is minimized.
Go to the address bar in Firefox and enter about:config
If you are using Firefox 3, you may get a warning. Just skip it.
Once you get shown all of the preferences right-click in the main part of the page and select New > Boolean.
Enter the name as config.trim_on_minimize
It'll then create the preference and the value will be set to false. Double-click on the entry and the value will toggle to true.
You need to restart Firefox for the change to take effect. But once you do Firefox will give up almost all of it's physical memory when it is minimized.
| Rating: | 100% positive, 2 total Votes |
| Categories: | firefox memory Windows |
| Added: | on Sep 26, 2008 at 2:04 pm |
| Added By: | an anonymous user |
| Searches: | firefox memory window reduce minimized |


One issue though: Did you monitor this before releasing it? I sat and watched the RAM count off Task Manager and it slowly rised from 14,000~ kb to 16,000~ kb. Not a drastic change, but it could result in it returning to its original RAM count.