High memory usage can slow down a program or the operating system. While I personally never experienced that in Firefox on my computer systems, I know of users who did and still do. Finding the cause for the high memory usage in Firefox would obviously be the best solution for the issue. Sometimes though that is not possible.
The next best thing is a solution that mitigates the issue. Some Firefox users close and re-open the browser regularly to flush and reset the web browser’s memory use. Others install add-ons that optimize memory usage of Firefox or perform other operations that reduce the browser’s use of memory.
Memory Restart is one of those add-ons. It is a fairly simple add-on that displays the browser’s current memory utilization in the status bar. The add-on highlights below peak memory usage in red.
A left-click on the icon displays a restart prompt. A click on yes restarts the browser, no closes the prompt without actions being taken.
Memory used by the browser is not updated in realtime, the program seems to update the count once per minute.
The information alone would be useful enough, but Memory Restart brings another feature to the table that might even be more to the liking of Firefox users with memory issues.
The extension can restart the browser automatically if the memory usage goes through the default memory threshold of 500Mb.
This default threshold can be changed in the program’ options. Here it is furthermore possible to enable the automatic restart option when the limit is reached by the browser. This happens without notification or user interaction. A countdown or notification option could improve the process to give Firefox users enough time to save their work on the web before the browser is restarted by the extension.
Firefox users can download Memory Restart from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.
© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: Firefox, firefox add-ons, firefox memory usage
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