How to Run Firefox Faster by Moving Profile to Ramdisk

The fastest memory available in a computer is built inside the CPU itself in the form of a small cache called L1, L2 or L3 cache. But these are for the internal use of the CPU and you cannot directly access any of these. The second fastest memory available in your PC is the RAM which is also called volatile physical memory. The data in the RAM can be stored using a special program but this data is volatile and it is destroyed when you shut down Windows and power off your PC.

But since the RAM is really fast memory (faster than your standard SSD), it can be used to speed up your Firefox web browsing experience. You can use a special software like Dataram RAMDisk or AMD Radeon RamDisk to create a virtual disk using a small portion of your PC’s RAM. After this, you can move the Firefox profile to this RamDisk and it will load really fast. Here is how:

  1. Download and install Dataram RAMDisk in Windows from http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk. The free software can create RamDisk of up to 1GB in size.
  2. Open Firefox browser, type about:profiles in the address bar and press Enter.Firefox Move Profile to RAM Disk
  3. Click on the Show Folder button for the Root Directory folder for your Firefox profile.
  4. Copy all the files from the profile folder that opens up to a folder names profile on the ramdisk you have created using Dataram RAMDisk. For example, I copied all the files from the profile folder to Z:\Profile.
  5. Close all the open Firefox windows.
  6. Right-click on the Mozilla Firefox desktop shortcut, select Properties and then append a space followed by -profile “Z:\Profile” in the Target command line for launching Firefox. Click on the OK button to save the changes.Firefox Move Profile to RAM Disk
  7. Now if launch Firefox browser using this desktop shortcut, it will be launched with its profile from the RAM making it extremely fast.

Please note that in order to have optimum experience with RAM disks of any sort, your PC must have RAM memory of  8GB or more. The free version of Dataram RAMDisk can only create a RAM disk of only 1GB maximum size. If your Firefox profile grows larger than that, then you will have to either use some other software or buy a premium Dataram RAMDisk license.