Give Firefox a Performance Boost

Reader Matt writes in to offer some advice on fixing the Firefox memory leak, and asks for more Firefox performance tweaking tips.

Here's the memory leak tip, though I've seen reports that it may not work in all cases. Firefox memory leak problems (where the browser slowly fills up all available RAM and then some) are usually caused by third-party plug-ins that are poorly designed. If you've got a leak and this tip doesn't help, try removing suspect plug-ins next.

Here are some other good sources for tips on how to make Firefox foxier and more fiery.

A good first stop would be to take a spin by Mozilla's Firefox page, which has a few dozen good tricks, tips, and hacks. Of special note on the performance front is this tip on improving page rendering speed.

Firetune is a third-party application designed to make Firefox easier to tweak and "noticeably" faster. It's freeware, but donations are requested.

For the heaviest-duty of Firefox tweaks, check out this list of 13 performance-boosting tips. You'll need to be comfortable modifying your user.js file or using the about:config method in the page rendering tip above. Hack at your own risk, and have fun!