Although Mozilla Firefox is a great web browser with stratospheric security, yet it is no secret that it is also a big memory hog. Even with the latest Australis UI update in Firefox version 29, there seems to be no alleviation to this memory consumption problem. If you open four tabs in Google Chrome and same four sites in Firefox, then the memory consumption in Firefox would be at least ten times more than that of Chrome. We have previously published about Memory Fox extension that can drastically reduce the memory consumption in Firefox. But Memory Fox uses a Windows binary application and cannot be used in Linux or Mac. If you want to cut down the memory usage of Firefox in any platform, then you can rely on the Suspend Tab extension.
The Suspend Tab extension can reduce the memory consumption in Firefox by suspending the background tabs and clearing the memory used by them. It features both automatic suspension of the background tabs after a specified interval of time and manual suspension/resumption of any selected tabs.
After the installation of the Suspend Tab extension, you can right-click on any of the tabs in Firefox and select Suspend Tab from the context menu. This would immediately clear all the memory used by that tab and put it in the background.
At any later time, if you want to switch back to that suspended tab, then you can right-click on it and choose Resume Tab from the menu. This will load the webpage in that tab again after which you can switch to that tab and start using it as usual.
In the Suspend Tab extension options, you can choose to automatically suspend the background tabs after a specified time period (by default it is 30 minutes). You can also specify if there is any website that you not want to be suspended at all. Under the Menu section, you can choose the context-menu items that are displayed when you right-click on a tab.
Conclusion: The Suspend Tab extension allows you to reduce the memory consumption of the Firefox web browser. Unlike the Memory Fox extension that works only in Windows, it can be used on all platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac).
You can download Suspend Tab extension from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-tab/.