Mozilla Firefox 4 Memory Use Leak Fix

I like to have upwards of 20 tabs open in Mozilla Firefox. Lately I've upgraded to Firefox 4 and, after some initial adjustments, things were going swell.

But then, suddenly, Firefox started hogging more and more memory, to the extent that my laptop became unusable due to no memory.

[UPDATE: While the workaround below might still work for you, I found a better solution here: Firefox Memory Problem Solved?]



The mozilla.com site is not very helpful when you search for the solution to the problem. Instead of providing suggestions or collections of solutions that people have used (given the imperfect descriptions of the problem that people invariably come up with), they bicker back and forth with the Mozilla Firefox users.

So I had to look further for the solution. Enter

Mozilla Firefox 4 Memory Use Leak Fix

Finally, I found a possible solution to the growing Firefox Memory at this site:

http://www.browsermemory.com/

Here, a Firefox Add-On is offered, called MemoryFox, and I tried it out! The guy was able to do more in terms of analyzing Firefox memory usage than the entire team at mozilla.com, seems like.

My result after install of the MemoryFox plugin? From 700 MByte of memory, shown in Windows Task Manager, Firefox memory use goes down to 134 MByte? Sounds good.

Well, the jury is still out and the plug in does show fluctuations in memory. But, with the same tabs open, at least the machine is not freezing up.

So far, thumbs up for the MemoryFox.

Let me know your experience in the comments below. Follow this blog for updates. I will post after a week or so after the dust has settled. So far, it looks promising.