Cybernet Technology News offers a quick fix that can help with Firefox’s annoying memory leakage. This fix will bump memory usage down to under 10MB every time you minimize Firefox (Windows OS, only). When minimized, it writes Firefox to the hard drive and fetches it from there when you maximize. Memory obviously increases again, but the process will release some of the “excess” memory Firefox is holding onto. In the test the author did, the browser started off using 180MB of memory. After minimizing, then maximizing, it only inflated back to 60MB.
Allegedly, IE and Opera already do this memory management. Hopefully, Firefox will implement it in a future release. Until they do, there’s a simple change to perform in the Firefox config file.
See the steps after the jump…