We all know that Firefox is a memory hog. Add-ons and themes can cause these types of problems, but I also discovered from a friend of mine that the amount of sites you have visited can cause issues with memory too. This means every time you visit a different page, you can always click the Back button to go back to a previous page. Firefox keeps saving those pages in memory, thus taking up more and more memory with the more pages you visit. This can add up quickly if you have several different tabs with different histories.

With this tip I started making sure I closed my browser every few hours or so to start with a clean slate. Sometimes the simple stuff makes a huge difference.

How to export your Firefox bookmarks to a bookmark.html file so that you may import it into another application.

1. Open Firefox.

2. Select Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks.

3. The Bookmarks Manager opens. Click File > Export…

4. Save the bookmark.html file wherever you wish. I usually prefer the Desktop.

Now you can use the file to import the bookmarks into another program.

Crazy Flash animations are constantly getting in the way of my Internet experience. I once resorted to uninstalling Flash player completely, but I quickly found myself needing Flash to play games and for those stupid web developers that have chosen to make an entire site using Flash without an HTML alternative.

I found an amazing solution that fits my needs perfectly. Using the Block Flash Animations & Advertisements Firefox hack, I can choose when I want to let Flash load in my browser. It turns all Flash animations on a web page into a Click to play link. No more Flash covering what I’m reading. No more obnoxious ads hogging memory. I just click on the Flash animations I wish to see.

All you do is add the following code to your UserContent.css file (create it if it doesn’t exist) in your Firefox Profile folder.

/* Block Flash, using a placeholder you can click to unblock a desired Flash animation. */
/* Doesn’t work for embed tags, which are less common than object tags - bug 190970 */
object[classid$=”:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000″],
object[codebase*=”swflash.cab”] {
-moz-binding: url(”http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~jruderma/flash.xml#obj”); }

I love you like a girlfriend Flash, but like a girlfriend, you’re annoying and always interrupt my web porn hour.

Did you know there is a setting in Firefox that enables it to try to guess which web pages you will be visiting next? It then downloads these pages and stores them to make them quickly available to you if you actually visit the page. I personally don’t like this setting. It can cause Firefox to use resources to cache web pages I may never visit. I disabled this setting. Here’s how.

1. Type about:config in the address bar and press ENTER.

2. Locate the entry for network.prefetch-next

3. Set it to false to disable this feature. Double-clicking on the setting will change it.

See also: Mozillazine - Network.prefetch-next

Lately I’ve been skeptical about Firefox. It seems lately they are bombarding us with updates, and with each one comes new problems. I appreciate them being on top of things, but the updates have caused many problems with my add-ons. It also seems that Firefox crashes about as many times as Netscape 6 used to, even when I have all add-ons disabled. Firefox has always taken up way too much memory, which is supposed to be adaptive based on how much RAM my system has available, but I no longer believe that. It seems to be quite a hog no matter what.

It doesn’t seem that Firefox 3 will make any major improvements. It looks and feels the same, only the engine is supposed to be much faster, and it is based on my first look at it. Over time though, the browser seems to only be getting more and more bloated instead of the trim and quick browser I remembered with 1.0. It might be time to switch back to IE or perhaps give Safari for Windows a try.