Firefox Minimise Hack

The first hack that I have here is the popular Firefox Minimize Hack that has recently flashed through the internet. The purpose of this hack tries to keep Firefox from eating up your physical RAM and instead puts the burden on your hard drive, or at least that is the general reason behind it. To implement this hack, perform the following steps.

1. With Firefox up and running, type about:config and hit enter.
2. Right click on the new page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the pop-up window, type in “config.trim_on_minimize” without quotes and hit enter.
4. In the next pop-up window, select True and hit enter.
5. Restart your browser

With that done, open up a bunch of tabs and monitor the memory usage. In my first run without this hack, Firefox was using 137.8 Mb of Ram. With all 30 tabs open again, Firefox was using 118.4 Mb, but when minimized this dropped to an astounding 4 Mb. However, this was too good to be true, I left Firefox minimized and came back 12 minutes later and the memory use had slowly creeped up to 42.4 Mb. While this was 10 times larger than the initial 4.2 Mb, I was still saving about 75 Mb. One note about this, the memory was still very slowly creeping up by about 1 Mb per minute, maybe more or less per minute, but either way it was still creeping. I would have liked to test to see if it would creep up to the original 118.4 Mb but that would have required more than an hour and I am impatient. Another note, when I had Firefox maximized it was using 66 Mb with Flickr.com as the main tab, but 119 Mb when I quickly browsed through all my tabs and then quickly retreated back down to 66 Mb. I don’t know what causes this, but either way, for the most time it was using 66 Mb.