The (seemingly) biggest complaint Firefox (version 2 at the time of this writing) users have is that the browser takes up enormous amounts of system memory when running. While the number and type of extensions you have installed on Firefox can influence memory usage, it is not unheard of for the browser to be consuming 200 MB (or more) of memory with no extensions and only a couple of tabs open.
Of course, I have this problem as well and the best way I have found to combat it is to simply close the browser at the end of the day and start a new session in the morning. For the most part, I turn my computer off at night, but when I don’t I make sure I start a new Firefox session before getting my day started.
Occasionally I will check the amount of memory Firefox is using before shutting it down and several times I have seen usage of 300 MB. This is pretty ridiculous when you only have 2 extensions (Google Toolbar and Salesforce Toolbar) and no more than 3 tabs open. Closing Firefox and reopening drops the memory usage down to about 65 MB (until the end of the day of course).
Hopefully Mozilla will look into this for future releases, but until then, this is a serviceable workaround.
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good tip. sometimes it really gets out of hand. i am currently switching between FF2 and FF3 beta. I am a tab fiend and leave tabs open or just dont wanna bookmark them(I know I would never get back to the page, lol). With around 20 or 30 tabs open, FF2 consumes about 200-350MB memory(I have quite a few addons) and in FF3 with the same tabs open, it takes 100MB. It could be that half my addons are disabled but FF2 is still a major memory hog. Good news is that pretty soon, one will not have to worry about it.
Wow, then try out Firefox 3.7 (agreed I’m posting 6 months in the future) but it’s gone from 3.0 (a giant leap from 2.0) up to 3.5 (about ten times faster) to 3.6 and 3.7 in testing (about fifty times faster – subjectively). Running tests on my system show some 150 times (not percent) speed increases, and the lowest increase I found was 4 times faster.
I can handle the maths for a 400% increase, but times is just a little mindblowing.