Ever have nine Firefox windows open, with 5+ tabs in each?  This could easily chew up 250 megs of memory or more, even if you suddenly reduce to one window with no tabs. On a system with less than 1 gig of memory, these are valuable system resources we’re talking about here.

There is a setting that will make Firefox swap its memory when minimized, which, if you’re low on memory to begin with, could mean a tremendous performance boost.

In Firefox’s location bar, type: about:config and agree to clear the warning message.

Right-click anywhere and create a new boolean value called:

[code]
config.trim_on_minimize
[/code]

Then select true for the value. Click Ok and restart Firefox.

When firing up the browser again, we should see immediate improvements in memory consumption when the browser is minimized, as the memory it ties up will be swapped to the disk instead.