If you are running Firefox web browser on a low end computer system that does not carry more than one GB of physical memory (RAM), then perhaps you would experience some sluggishness in the computer performance especially when doing multi-tasking. Not many computers today come with only one or two GB of RAM, but if yours does and you still want to run Firefox along with some other applications then you might want to minimize the memory usage of Firefox so that your PC does not become unresponsive. There are so many ways to keep the Firefox memory usage in check like Memory Fox or FireMin, but they all requires you to install an add-on in Firefox.
Although these add-ons give you some of the more advanced features, you can free up memory used up by Firefox using an in-built feature in the browser itself. Here is how:
- First of all you may want to note the Firefox memory usage so that can compare how much memory has been freed. In Windows, you can do this through the Task Manager (you can press the Ctrl+Shift+Esc key combination to open it).
- Now a new tab in Firefox browser, type about:memory and press Enter.
- Click on the Minimize memory usage button given under the “Free memory” category. This should instantly clear all the unused memory space that was claimed by Firefox.
- Back in the Task Manager, you can notice that the memory usage for Firefox has gone down a little bit. For the latest version of Firefox browser (version 43.0.1) running on my Windows 10 PC, the memory usage went down over 100 MB.
Conclusion: You can free up and minimize the memory claimed by Firefox easily though the features built inside the Firefox browser itself. Even though it does not give you any options to free up the memory automatically like some add-ons do, it is good enough to reduce the Firefox memory consumption.
This works really good but the for only a few minutes… I guess I have to upgrade my 1GB RAM to 2GB for long term solution …thankyou anyway