Even though Firefox 2 was only officially released yesterday, Gina Trapani, from LifeHacker has already put together a short article with some quick tweaks for everyone’s favorite Open-Source browser. Here are some of the tips I found interesting, you can see the others on the original article by clicking “Visit Site” below.

Session restore

Fx 2 only: As a blogger and web mail user, it breaks my heart to recount how many times I’ve composed a long post or email message, then accidentally closed the tab or browser and lost all my work. No more! With Firefox 2, set the browser.startup.page key to 3 to restore your browsing session - with form entries intact! - every time you start your browser or undo close tab after a wayward click. Note: By default, Firefox 2 automatically restores your session if your browser crashes - but this does it every time you restart your browser normally. Thanks for the tip, Arun!

Limit RAM usage

All versions: Goodness knows I’ve done a good amount of belly-aching about Firefox’s voracious appetite for RAM. (It’s consistently the most memory-intensive process on both my PC and Mac.) Happily a simple config tweak got Mem Use right back down to a more comfortable number. Along with the previous prefetch mod, set your browser.cache.disk.capacity to a value that fits your total RAM.

  • Key: browser.cache.disk.capacity
  • Modified Value: Depends on your system’s total memory. According to Computerworld:

    For RAM sizes between 512BM and 1GB, start with 15000. For RAM sizes between 128MB and 512M, try 5000.