Fix Firefox Memory Issues
I don’t know about you but I’ve had a BIG problem with Firefox over the past few months – it uses a ton of memory when it’s running and oftentimes goes into “not responding” mode.
I love Firefox, don’t get me wrong…well, let me rephrase that, I love Firefox for the extensions that I use. Being in online marketing and SEO there are some plugins that I simply can’t do without.
But it was really annoying each time I would head to Firefox and have it hog a ton of memory or worse yet, not respond at all.
After about an hour of research I came across a website that lists all of the plugins for Firefox that could cause it to hang. Lo and behold, one of the extensions was one that I used on a regular basis.
You can find the problematic plugins/extensions list at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions – it’s in alphabetical order so just open up your list of plugins on Firefox (Tools -> Addons -> Extensions) and run through your list as you run through the list at MozillaZine.org.
The next thing I did was search out a “memory saver” alternative and after traversing multiple message boards and blog posts, I came across “Firefox Ultimate Optimizer“.
Now truth be told, when I got to the free download section of the site; the free download location was having issues so I had to look elsewhere for the free version of the tool.
Secondly, after I installed it, it “pre-installed” with two items I did NOT want…so naturally I ran an AVG Scan on the tool which came back clean. I still ended up deleting those “extras”.
However, the tool works great! My Firefox memory usage went down from 250,000K to around 1000K. Not bad at all.
After I removed the plugin and using Firefox Ultimate Optimizer, Firefox isn’t running at perfection but it’s definitely improved by about 80%.
So if you’ve been having issues with Firefox hogging up your memory or going into an unresponsive mode, these two resources should help you out considerably.
Now, if you don’t have Firefox, I still suggest that you get it. It’s tons better than Internet Explorer and while not quite as fast as Google’s Chrome, it still offers all of those great plugins that Chrome does not.
*just a side note here – I have noticed that Firefox IS faster at loading Java than Chrome is. *
Until next time!
Kristine
