Have you heard of Memory Fox addon for Firefox? It is a Firefox addon that promises to reduce the memory consumption of Firefox. But does it work?
With the recent release of Firefox 7, Mozilla has done some amazing job in reducing the memory usage of Firefox. Mozilla claims that it has reduced the memory usage by over 50%. But most users reported that they didn’t feel any reduction. One of the reasons for feeling no change is because most Firefox users use a lot of plugins. If you try Firefox with all addons disabled, you can feel the difference in memory usage.
There is also a plugin available in Mozilla plugin directory, named Memory Fox, which claims it can reduce the memory usage. I was skeptical at first, but after trying it out, I have to say I’m blown away. In the plugin description, the author explains how his plugin works. I don’t know why Mozilla has already integrated these changes directly into Firefox. It seems that there is still some memory leakage issues with Firefox.
Options in Memory Fox
As we can see there are mainly two options available. One is for activating Memory Fox only for Firefox alone and the other one is for activating Memory Fox for all the processes.
Blacklist is an option in Memory Fox which you can use to prevent the use of Memory Fox on that particular process.
This is what I got after I used Memory Fox on browser only option.
Before:
After:
Download Memory Fox
You can download Memory Fox from Firefox addon directory. I highly recommend that you download and use Memory Fox. Instead of tuning it on all the time, I use Memory Fox browser only option after running Firefox for a while when I feel that Firefox is using too much memory. You can also read about Memory Fox here.
Additional Tricks To Control Firefox Memory Usage
There are simple tips and tricks you can use to reduce the memory consumption by Firefox. You can
Turn off plugins that you don’t use.
Use a simple theme.
Close used tabs.
Close tabs with flash after use.
These are some of the additional ways to you make sure that Firefox is using only required memory. If you have more tips on how to reduce memory usage by Firefox, don’t forget to mention them via comments and I’ll be happy to add them here.