Hob's zeitgeist

Thursday, February 02, 2006

After installing Firefox 1.5, I was upset to notice that the minimize-to-free-memory trick from version 1.0.7 stopped working. Here's how to get the old behavior back.

Type in about:config in the address bar.
Right click on the list and select New -> Boolean.
Type in config.trim_on_minimize as the preference name.
Set the value to be true.
Restart Firefox and tada!

Now, if Firefox memory usage rises too much (if you open too many tabs etc.), simply minimize Firefox and the memory usage will drop dramatically (usually to around 5-10 MB.)

1 comment:

Kousik said...: just to maintain the history of the tabs, firefox uses a lot of memory. But if I minimize and maximize later, will it reclaim back the memory it'd use for keeping the history?

If it didn't, performance will suck after minimizing. That'd be another bug, contradicting the previous one :-)

Thank god I spent some extra 4000/- to get an additional memory chip.; 1:09 AM