Firefox high memory consumption is one of the biggest challenges this popular, open-source project, has faced in tough browser wars, while there have been quite a few attempts to make the web-browser optimized with forks and utilities and Mozilla foundation even addressed the "memory leakage" issue with targeted efforts like MemShrink - the results were promising but nothing very exciting.

Enter "Firemin" - the free, handy, little, portable application which magically shrinked my Firefox memory usage 188 times within seconds (see comparison picture below) of launching. You simply launch the application and it eliminates all Firefox memory leaks, including the one's caused by extensions.

Mozilla Firefox 7 Final is out now and feature's the much awaited MemShrink memory optimizations to the popular web-browser, the new update to Firefox 6 brings an overall faster browsing experience to users by offering faster speeds when opening new tabs, enhanced performance when lots of tabs are open and during long Web browsing sessions that last hours or days, more responsive clicking on menu items and buttons on websites, lower memory consumption (see comparison between Firefox 6 and Firefox 7 before and after update with same tabs and load).

Apart from the memory and speed enhancements - this release also features new tools which are designed to make it easier for developers to build speedy Web experiences for users. A new version of hardware-accelerated Canvas, W3C navigation timing spec API (allowing developers to measure page load time and other related crucial factors) and a brand new Telemetry tool to collect performance data across userbase for improving the browser performance further are also included.

Mozilla Firefox has never been good with system memory consumption, the free open-source web-browser is a very well-known memory guzzler thanks to various memory leaks in it's codebase. There have been various un-official solutions to the problem and addons like RamBack do help make things in-control a bit, but nothing works as a concrete solution to the problem which is needed to face-off today's tough competition.

Mozilla developers have now decided to finally address the issue seriously and a dedicated team called MemShrink is now in-operation to tackle the issue.

Firefox takes up too much system resources with multiple tabs open, there have been addons like RAMBack, Clusters, and TooManyTabs promising to take care of this but none of the above were practical to use and therefore did not remained on my computer after few days usage, however new addon BarTab is a perfect practical solution to the problem which works amazingly and I am definitely going to keep it - what BarTab does that it prevents loading tabs until needed saving system resources. Whenever you start Firefox instead of loading all the tabs BarTab puts all the tabs on your bartab and loads them only when you click on them.

Since there is no extra tab-bar this is very practical to use providing EXCEPTIONALLY good results, my Firefox memory resources usage went down from 241 MB to just 82 MB that's an amazing 290% improvement.

If you work with many tabs open Firefox is known to be a memory guzzler, RAMBack a free Firefox addon promises to take care of this by issuing an internal notification to free up memory that is otherwise held for performance purposes.

I tested RAMBack on two different computers and the results were very much varying, on one computer I did noticed decrease in FIREFOX RAM Usage but on second PC there was no change at all.