Mozilla Firefox is one of the best web browsers that ever existed. It features so much customization through a huge collection of extensions, that everyone can have their own flavor of Firefox in their computers. Additionally, Firefox is super secure and can protect you from malicious and phishing sites. But there is one problem with Firefox – it consumes too much memory. And if you have a computer with less than 1GB of physical memory (RAM), then it can easily give you computer blues. I myself have seen many times how the memory usage of Firefox keeps climbing up even when you are not touching its window.
If you want to reduce the memory consumption of Mozilla Firefox or set a limit to how much memory it can claim, then you can follow these simple instructions:
- Open Mozilla Firefox browser.
- Type in about:config in the Firefox address bar and press Enter.
- You would see a warning message saying something about voiding your warranty. Click on the I’ll be careful, I promise button to proceed.
- Type cache.memory in the Search field to narrow down the listing to the settings that we are looking for.
- If you want to disable Firefox from storing the cache into the memory, then find the setting named browser.cache.memory.enable and set its value to false.
- If you do not want to stop Firefox from storing cache into the physical memory, then you can reduce the cache store limit. In order to do this, find a setting named browser.cache.memory_limit and set its value to 4096. The value of this setting is the number of maximum kilobytes of RAM that Firefox will use for storing cache.
- You have to restart Firefox, for the settings to take effect.
Even though you can stop Firefox from storing cache in the memory to reduce memory consumption, but there are other things like Firefox program memory, extensions and number of tabs that have to be stored in the physical memory. So do not expect magic to happen, Firefox will still continue to consume around 200MB of your RAM.