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Any advice on how to make Firefox less of a bloated system sucking leach?
I went to try Chrome instead and it did not work at all and I prefer Firefox better anyway.

My advice is to try Chrome again.

I do not want to use Chrome.

Nope. I found that loading ad block and flash block helped a ton for those sites that abuse flash and display far too many bloated ads.

Beyond that, upgrade to a quad core i7 and 6 to 8 GB of memory, plus maybe an SSD.

There are online guides that give you some setting tips that will change how firefox uses memory and processor resources, but usually they have tradeoffs that are annoying in their own way.

Also, rather than opening millions of sites, start using rss to consume those sites where it makes sense. That should speed things up as well.

I've found chrome to be just as bad a memory hog on non-topgrade systems as firefox, and often times is even slower during address typing/predicting.
As for firefox, the number one recommendation I can make is limit the number of tabs you open, and close the whole thing down frequently. Bastard bloats up as if it has a memory leak real bad when left open. My firefox experience got a whole lot better when I started just Xing out instead of minimizing it. Bear in mind that despite "vanishing" it still takes a minute or so to unload itself from memory. Sometimes, if I've had it open a long time, I just say "screw it" and kill it in task manager instead of closing it gracefully. I've yet to suffer an ill effect because of doing so.

Disconnected said:

i use ie

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GasBandit said:

I've found chrome to be just as bad a memory hog on non-topgrade systems as firefox, and often times is even slower during address typing/predicting.
As for firefox, the number one recommendation I can make is limit the number of tabs you open, and close the whole thing down frequently. Bastard bloats up as if it has a memory leak real bad when left open. My firefox experience got a whole lot better when I started just Xing out instead of minimizing it. Bear in mind that despite "vanishing" it still takes a minute or so to unload itself from memory. Sometimes, if I've had it open a long time, I just say "screw it" and kill it in task manager instead of closing it gracefully. I've yet to suffer an ill effect because of doing so.

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Thats what Ive been doing. I guess Ill just carry on then.

makare said:

Thats what Ive been doing. I guess Ill just carry on then.

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The most brusque answer is to buy more ram. I only experience problems on machines with less than 2 gigs of ram, and ram is the cheapest it's ever been right now. Jaw droppingly cheap.

yeah but id have to have it installed because it is a laptop and i dont know how to open it

makare said:

yeah but id have to have it installed because it is a laptop and i dont know how to open it

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Hit it REAAAAAALLY hard.

makare said:

yeah but id have to have it installed because it is a laptop and i dont know how to open it

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What kind of laptop? You'd be surprised how easy installing ram can be on some laptops. They usually put the sticks right on top the board just under the keyboard or wrist rest. If it's on the bottom there's usually a panel just for the ram.

Firefox 7 just came out, and it's promising lower memory usage... but doesn't every new Firefox release promise to fix the memory leaks?

I'll try it out for a little while and see.