Everyone and their mother is linking to Ben Goodger’s blog entry regarding Firefox 1.5′s increased memory requirements. The problem? Firefox’s Back-Forward cache, which theoretically optimizes web surfing by caching the last X pages that you’ve visited, in hopes that you’ll hit the Back button.
I can see how this would be good for some people. Personally, I almost never use the back button. I open links in new tabs, so I always have access to the page I was originally on. For users like me, there is a way to disable the cache:
No more than 8 pages are ever cached in this fashion, by default. If you set this preference to another value, e.g. 25, 25 pages will be cached. You can set it to 0 to disable the feature, but your page load performance will suffer.
Load performance may suffer, but Firefox’s memory usage was cut in half! I’ll take waiting an extra couple of seconds to free up 50mb of system RAM!
