Firefox Hack Back Button Memory Consumption

Here is something for you to try out. Open Firefox and visit a website. Something like Microsoft, Mozilla or The Register will do. Open the Task Manager or another process viewer and take a look at the current memory consumption which should be between 40-60 Megabytes depending on the add-ons that you have installed.

Now visit several links on the website you are currently on and observe the memory consumption. It does rise, does not it ? It seems to rise continuously although only one tab and website is open all the time.

The reason behind this is that Firefox does store previous visited websites for the Back Button. The benefit is that hitting back will load the website from memory cache which is a lot faster than from normal cache or requesting the website from the server again.

Some users do not use the Back button a lot and decided to disable this functionality in order to save memory. Type about:config in the address bar and filter for the string browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers

Set this string to 0 to disable this functionality, the default value is -1. Now close Firefox, open it again and redo the steps. You will see that the memory consumption is not rising.