When you visit a website in a web browser, it downloads the web page content like the HTML files, images, animations, and other media files before rendering them inside the browser window and showing them to you. To avoid the downloading of the same content over and over again, web browsers save this downloaded content on your disk in the form of browser cache. When you visit the same website, the browser will check the server response to see of the content has changed and if it hasn’t then there is no need to re-download it again. In that case, the browser simply displays the content from the cache.
Reusing the already downloaded content from the browser cache not only saved the bandwidth of both the client (that’s you) and the server, but it also makes web browsing much faster. However, if the web server response shows that the content has changed, then web browser will download it again.
But it is not possible to store all of the downloaded web content on the local storage disks, because the disks are also going to be used for other programs and other tasks. This is why all the web browsers, including Mozilla Firefox, use only a small portion of the disk and store the browser cache in a small folder. Based on your needs, you can increase or decrease the size of the browser cache in the Firefox browser. Here is how:
- Open Firefox browser, type about:preferences#advanced and press Enter. Alternatively, you can also click on the menu icon (hamburger look alike icon near top-right corner), select Options from this menu and later select Advanced category from the options screen.
- Select the Network sub-section from under the Advanced category.
- Under the Cached Web Content, place a checkmark in the checkbox labeled Override automatic content management. After this you can manually set the cache limit to your own desired size. The changes should take effect as soon as you change the cache size.
Note that this is the maximum cache limit size and you should not use an enormous cache size for this limit. The web content cache size should be carefully picked – it should neither be very small nor be very large. For an average user, the content size should be around 300 MB.