So one day I was happily surfing the Internet, but felt a sudden, violent urge to check my CPU memory usage. What do I find? This:

Now, LimeWire, I understand. I remember, when I was still working as a Technical Support Representative, we used to advise customers to avoid using file-sharing programs such as LimeWire, because they could eat up memory, in addition to bandwidth. But Firefox? THE Mozilla Firefox? The world’s number one browser in terms of usability?

Luckily, I was able to find this old article entitled “How to reduce the memory usage on Firefox?”. Try visiting the site if you are experiencing issues with a slow Firefox as I am.

Basically, the site points you to several manual steps that you can perform to make browsing with Firefox faster. Among them:

1. Check your extensions and themes
2. Check the plug-ins
3. Clear download history
4. Restart Firefox periodically
5. Assign memory cache on Firefox
6. Release memory when Firefox is minimized

However, some people may not find the idea of manual configuration easy to do. In that case, there is a plug-in that was created to do automatic configuration of Firefox. It’s called Firetune by TotalIdea. According to the Firetune page,

FireTune for Mozilla Firefox v1.x / 2.x was developed for an easy and fast optimization of your browsing experience with Firefox. It is based on a collection of popular and well working optimization settings used and tested by the experts. Usually you have to optimize Firefox manually, which can be time consuming and difficult for the novice user. FireTune helps you here – it includes all the performance optimizations. The only thing you must do is: make your selection. FireTune does the work for you.

Download Firetune. It’s FREE.

On a personal note…

I received my grades for the Second Semester of this last school year last week, and, I must say, I am proud of this achievement. Here’s to brag:

By the way, I am taking up Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering here at Saint Louis College.