Reduce Memory Consumption in Firefox with Memory Fox Next

Almost four years ago, we published about Memory Fox – an add-on for Firefox that could reduce the memory consumption of the web browser. But if you visit Mozilla add-ons website, you will no longer find this useful add-on. This is perhaps because Richard Tharp, the developer of the original Memory Fox add-on, passed away in 2014. A few months later Firefox made it mandatory for all the developers to have their add-ons signed. Without Richard Tharp being able to sign the Memory Fox add-on, it was removed.

I am sure there are thousands of Firefox uses who miss the Memory Fox add-on just like I do. But now someone has uploaded the same original Memory Fox add-on with all the signing requirements and after making a few changes and relabeling it as “Memory Fox Next”. It uses the older legacy Firefox extensions programming and therefor has access to all of your Firefox data.

After the installation of this new add-on, you will have to restart the web browser and might see some errors in Firefox. This is because the extension still has some parts that were meant to work with older Firefox versions. Anyhow, you will get the familiar “M” button in the Firefox toolbar on the left side. You can click on it to toggle the Memory Fox Next for the browser only or for all the processes associated with Firefox.

In the options for the Memory Fox Next extension, you can choose notifications (visual or audio), and the time period after which it triggers recovery of the memory held by Firefox processes. You can also log various events of Memory Fox Next.

Even though the new modified add-on works on the recent versions of Firefox, it still uses the older “afom.exe” binary that is behind cleaning up of the RAM since the source-code of this program is not available. But it seems to work fine under Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.

You can get the Memory Fox Next extension for Firefox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/memory-fox-next/.