Reduce Firefox memory/RAM usage

We all love Firefox but hate its memory footprint, especially if you keep numerous tabs open simultaneously. I always love to find new ways on how to achieve better performance in my every day computing experience as well as faster speeds. Reducing memory footprints of applications or switching to lightweight applications is something I am passionate about.

Let me discuss few tips that I use to keep my Firefox slimmest on memory

Unload Tab extension

Modern web pages gorge heavily on memory and keeping too many tabs open is not a good idea. Often we forget to close the tabs that we do not need. Or we sometimes feel as if we would 'lose' our tabs. It is most probable that we do not use all the tabs open side by side. Eg. I would keep around 20 tabs open but would be frequently switching only between 4-5 tabs. Rest of the open tabs would consume system memory for no good. With a Firefox extension called Unload Tab, the unused Firefox Tabs would automatically be suspended and their memory would be released. You can also choose not to suspend particular sites/urls from being suspended automatically. I personally love this extension! Make sure  you choose not to automatically suspend dynamic sites like Facebook, Twitter etc. Otherwise you would not be able to receive any updates when your tab is inactive.

Cleanup Firefox's cache and History

Firefox uses in-memory indexes for history and bookmarks to keep them loaded for instant 'awesome-bar' results. Having big amount of history always available is good. But then you have to 'pay some costs'. It is better to remove stale history of a previous month or previous week to be on safer side.

Flash players (especially Youtube)

Many a time, we open a video on Youtube or Metacafe somewhere in some tab and then we switch to other tabs, not aware that it may hog a crazy amount of your system memory by even simply being open. It is just the way Flash player and plugin stuff works. Do not forget to close down the video playing (or Flash player) pages after you are done watching.

Avoid memory munching web pages

Here, you would have to use your own experience to find out which sites/pages have memory leaks and when they are open your memory usage gets higher and higher over time. One such site has been Wunderlist. For me, Firefox's memory consumption would cross beyond 1.5GB even when only a single tab with Wunderlist.com was opened in it. I hope Wunderlist should already have solved this memory leak issue. There may be many sites like this. Avoid them.

Too many add-ons/extensions

Well, having too many add-ons/extensions itself is not bad. But when you have some add-ons installed which implement themselves on each page and do some fancy stuff, their memory consumption would add up. Buggy extensions are worse! Best way is to avoid the add-ons you can live without. Or you can disable the unused extensions temporarily from add-ons menu.

Upgrade Firefox and its extensions

Over time, developers of Firefox and extensions tend to get better with their products in terms of stability, efficiency and memory consumption.

Firefox Health Report

You can go to Help menu and click on Firefox Health Report to learn more about your Firefox's health, startup times, troubling add-ons etc. 


Please feel free to add your own tips in comments.

Happy surfing! :) Thank you Firefox!