Firefox 3 Add-On Solves Memory Woes
The first Firefox 3 beta is just around the corner and promises a number of enhancements, including a reduction of the notoriously large memory footprint. We’ve written extensively about Firefox’s memory problems in the past and while Firefox 3 will address some of the issues, it won’t solve the problem for everyone.
Part of Firefox’s memory overhead is by design. Whenever you visit a page in Firefox, the browser caches it for some time. If you frequently go back and forth between pages this cuts down on load time, but the trade off is increased memory usage.
There are ways to limit the amount of caching through the config panel, but now there’s also RAMback, a Firefox extension from Stuart Parmenter that makes clearing out your Firefox caches a snap.
RAMback simply adds a menu item to the tools menu (pictured above) that allows you to quickly dump your caches. If you assign a keyboard shortcut to it, you’ve got a quick, simple way to dump caches whenever you need to.
Unfortunately RAMback is only available for Firefox 3. But with the beta due any day now, Firefox 3 is looking more viable all the time. I’ve been using the alpha 8 release off and on for a while now and those that have been using the nightly builds report that memory problems seem to diminish with every release, but it still isn’t perfect (that’s why it’s an alpha).
But in using alpha 8 with RAMback I found the memory usage was easy to keep down, especially for things like watching movies or other pages that leave large imprints on Firefox’s cache. And of course, many memory problems stem from add-ons, so there may still be a use for RAMback even if the final release of Firefox 3 does address most of your memory issues.
[via CyberNetNews]
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