Fairly Realistic

I love Firefox. Even though it uses hundreds of megabytes of memory at times, I still use it. A feature that Firefox employs is the pre-caching of pages that you might visit which translates to massive memory usage. This feature would have been great in 1999 when everyone was using a 56k modem. Now, that feature is pretty useless for everyone using a broadband connection. The pre-caching just looks at the web page you’re viewing and downloads some of the content linked to the current page. It’s trying to guess which links you’ll click on so that the pages will load faster. Again, a great idea… in 1999. This problem really shows its ugly head when you’re using tabs — especially if you use as many tabs as I do!

Luckily, there is an easy way to change the setting in Firefox (and Mozilla) that disables pre-caching. Open up a Firefox window and type about:config and hit Enter. This will show the Firefox configuration screen. In the Filter field type max_total and the option for browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers will appear. The default setting is -1 (meaning infinite). Change that to zero. Ta-da, pre-caching is disabled! You won’t notice a slow down if you’re using broadband (I didn’t) but you will see Firefox using less memory.

A lot of people are saying that this is a bug in Firefox but technically it is not. It was probably not a good idea to ship Firefox with this feature enabled though. Hopefully future versions and updates of Firefox will have this disabled by default. I would hate to see people stick with IE because they think that Firefox is too slow or is a memory-hog (which it’s not). Ditch IE now!