Group 1: People who are having trouble getting their old extensions to work
There is possible risk in overriding the compatibility test for extensions. Backup your profile before installing 1.5, and consider the risk before deciding if you want to use something like nightly tester tools to click the "make all compatible" button and force your extensions to try to work (some of them may make trouble if you do so). Check the homepage for each extension which the auto-update did not find a 1.5 compatible update for. Hopefully someone better at this can write a really easy for beginners step-by-step guide of how to check for updates for your extensions and if you want to risk it how to override the compatibility test, and if it screws you up and/or gives the gray bar at the bottom of the screen what you can do, if anything other than creating a new profile.
Group 2: People who are compulsive about checking memory usage, or people who actually see bad firefox or system performance due to firefox using memory
Firefox 1.5 has many features and options that may take more memory than it has in the past. If this bothers you, much of this can be changed.
If you like, things that may reduce memory usage: (of course there may be worse performance or other side effects)
1. Don't use adblock- uninstall it and use adblock plus.
2. Use fewer extensions.
3. Make firefox give up memory when minimized and take longer to un-minimize: go to about:config. Right click on blankness and tell it to make a new boolean. Call it config.trim_on_minimize , set it to true.
4. Disable prefetch: go to about:config. Search for prefetch, you'll find network.prefetch-next. Double click it to turn it false if it is on.
5. Disable fast back and forward : about:config, search for viewers, find browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers, set it to 0 to disable fast back and forward.
6. Limit the memory cache: about:config, new integer, browser.cache.memory.capacity, set it to the memory in KB you want to limit the memory cache to.
6. Don't use the firefox preloader.
7. Once in a while, close the browser completely and re-open it.
8. Support the adult industry and buy some DVDs instead of opening so many images in your browser
Some would say that if you don't see bad system or firefox performance, you shouldn't look at or care what the memory usage is. Some would also say that new computers and memory are cheap and you won't regret buying a better one or getting more memory. Decide for yourself.
Please list any other tips you know to reduce memory usage. No debates in this thread please, only corrections to factual mistakes or helpful suggestions. There is plenty of debate on these issues elsewhere.
