Memory Use in Firefox

Firefox is great in many respects, but it hogs memory: closing down tabs does not seems to cause Firefox to release memory as you might expect. Once FF has grabbed a few hundred Mb, your PC can slow down noticably. Having to restart the application seems like an indication of a bug to me* (though the FF developers are pretty gung-ho about it).

Here is a collection of tips to help reduce Firefox memory usage - most involve about:config hackery, and some work only on Windows (due to the way in which the Windows kernel will page out memory of minimized applications).

_{Check this out: This behavior has appeared somtime after 1.0 - unfortunately, I can't be more precise... - somtime [sic] after 1.0?? That is a long-running problem.}