Firefox Secrets & the Best of 2009

I have been using Chromium more often than Firefox lately but I think that these Firefox secrets just might change my mind. After all, some of these secrets are actually about limiting RAM usage. Yes! Limiting RAM usage. We should try these tips so we could know if it’s all true.

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4. Limit RAM usage: If Firefox takes up too much memory on your computer, you can limit the amount of RAM it is allowed to us. Go to about:config, filter “browser.cache” and select “browser.cache.disk.capacity”. It’s set to 50000, but you can lower it, depending on how much memory you have. Try 15000 if you have between 512MB and 1GB ram.

5. Reduce RAM usage further for when Firefox is minimized: This setting will move Firefox to your hard drive when you minimize it, taking up much less memory. And there is no noticeable difference in speed when you restore Firefox, so it’s definitely worth a go. Again, go to about:config, right-click anywhere and select New-> Boolean. Name it “config.trim_on_minimize” and set it to TRUE. You have to restart Firefox for these settings to take effect.

I never really tweaked these things on Firefox’s config area before so it looks like I’ve got quite a lot of homework to do to optimize Firefox. I miss using Firefox and the Greasemonkey scripts I used to have so if things work out, Firefox will remain as king of browsers on my computer. Another secret I like from that blog is the tip on using small icons. Small icons, for the win! I was using a Firefox theme which is quite minimalist before and I do remove some toolbars if I don’t use them. Less clutter, more space for pages I am browsing. Also, by default, a lot of the toolbars we install show up, if you uncheck them from “View > Toolbars” then you could have one or two less toolbars. It doesn’t mean that you’re uninstalling them so don’t worry.

Dmitri Popov wrote a blog entry on the best of 2009. This is, of course, in light of productive computing. Zotero is one of the mentioned items in the blog entry. For those who are doing quite a number of research work and for those who need information easily accessible to them, it’s an awesome Firefox plugin. It helps you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. I have yet to try Zotero but I think that it’s going to be a great tool for knowledge workers. Having a mini library of sorts is a good thing. I’ve been using delicious.com and its corresponding Firefox plugin as my collection manager but Zotero is intriguing with features like groups as well as having a Zotero server where you could sync your items.