FireFox is a memory hungry beast!

My copy of Mozilla’s Firefox (1.5.0.7) has been running very slow and often takes longer than Outlook to open!!!

Following some recommendations on the Google Operating System Blog I have modified my Firefox config using these details:
Type about:config in the address bar.

* create a new boolean entry config.trim_on_minimize and set it to true
* set browser.cache.memory.capacity to a fixed size (the default values are: for 256 MB RAM – 14336, 512 MB RAM – 22528, 1 GB RAM – 32768). A good value to try is 16384.
* set browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to 0
* change image.animation_mode to none

Go to Tools/Options.

* set the disk cache memory to a low value (less than 50 MB)
* turn off Java
* try to avoid these extensions: Adblock, Fasterfox, IE Tab, Session Saver. Use Adblock Plus instead of Adblock.
* don’t use more than 5 extensions

(More details here: Reduce Memory Using in Firefox)

There looks to be a lot of useful info on this blog – something I’ll definitely have to keep updated with!

(Might also try Firefox 3 Alpha as recommended there).