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You might have noticed that Firefox performs poorly when you surf for a long time or open lots of tabs at once. Many wrongly believe that this is due to some memory leak caused by extensions (even, I used to believe this). This is actually caused because Firefox stores 50 most recently visited websites in a memory session inorder to speed up the pageload of the previously visited site.

Average web surfer tend to visit only 3 – 5 websites out of the previously visited websites, so you can reduce the resource hog by changing the memory threshold to 5 (or anything below 50). This can be done by typing ‘about:config’ in your Firefox address bar and search for ‘browser.sessionhistory.max_entries’ (without quotes), right click on that entry and choose modify. Now set the value for 5 (or anything lower than 50).

I first read this trick on Ghack and then I tried it myself. It made my Firefox work smoothly for longer.

Via Jayaprakash



16 Comments and Trackbacks (Add Your Own)

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  1. Thanks for the Tricks thilak

  2. I have given it a shot. We will see what happens. I am assuming you have to restart Firefox for this to take place?

  3. One way I speeded up my firefox is by disabling the searching for updates at beginning. this really increased my start up speed.

    There are some other sweet firefox hacks.

  4. gr8 trick….but i suggest this thing can also be done by

    go to tools>Clear private data ,and check the appropriate boxes.

  5. Good info, if I am not wrong even the guys from This Week In Tech said that the problems were coming from memory leaks. I will try this tweak.

  6. Bryan: yup, I guess you’ll have to restart Firefox for the changes to reflect.

    Anirudh: We will be glad if you share them with us :D

    Abhishek: But, that will remove everything, including my saved password, history and cache files.

  7. It Really worked for me Thilak.Nice Trick :)

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