Fix the firefox memory hog

If you’ve been using firefox long enough you’ll agree, that the awesome browser can be a huge memory hog, specially on OS X. I switched to safari only for this reason, after 5 tabs I would begin to notice massive lags, ofcouse your mileage may wary but that has been my experience. So I tried to figure out why would mozilla do this to us, and if such a huge memory leak existed , why did they never fix it.

I found that the supposed memory leak is supposed to be a performance feature and each tab was assigned ridiculous amounts of memory to cache pages. I am using firefox 3.6, I don’t know if these options exist in older versions as well but they do exist in firefox 3.6

To fix this, type in “about:config” in the address bar

You can safely click next your computer will now burn out.

After clicking next type in “browser.cache” in the filter field.

Look for the value that says “browser.cache.memory.capacity”

It would say something ridiculously huge number , I’ve set it to 16384 , which roughly means 16 megs, and firefox is behaving itself ever since.

That’s it. Restart and enjoy.