Tweaking Firefox
I’ve got to admit that since I stopped working with computers it has become more fun to play around with them on my spare time. And since I’m currently unemployed I got lots of spare time!
Surfing the net and getting my bloglines aggregator working has been a real productivity booster when it comes to this area of my life. Some of the things I’ve found I want to share with you. Especially these two pages detailing how to tweak your Firefox to become less memory consuming and having some tips about good plugins to use.
- Firefox Tweaks, Extensions and Optimizations by Chris Morell
- Firefox Guide by Will Langford
Both pages have descriptions and recommendations for plugins and some tweaking of Firefox. I found a couple of plugins that I myself now use. Wonder how I could live without them!
- Tab Mix Plus – An excellent plugin to manage your tabs better! You get an X button for each tab, unread tabs marked in cursive red, every tabs progress in loading it’s content marked like in the Fission-plugin and more.
- Fission – Shows a progressbar in your adressbar for how long it will take the page to load. Invaluable for me, who is a bit impatient of nature
- PDF Download – Lets you choose what to do with PDF documents! I’ve been looking for this little baby for a long time. I don’t like my PDF documents to open in a Firefox window.
- The best for the last – Reveal – A little plugin that lets you view the content of your tabs in cute little miniwindows just by pressing F2, oh and some more, but that functionality in it self was worth the download!
And my favourite tweaking of Firefox and it’s memory usage:
- Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
- Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
- In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
- Now select True and then press Enter.
- Restart Firefox.
When I minimize Firefox it drops down to 10 MB of used memory! Mmmm! *cuddles with the tweak*