Back Button Hack

The next hack deals with Firefox’s Cache. Whenever you jump around the Internet, Firefox caches your previous pages to make your internet browsing blazing fast. However this causes Firefox to consume memory that you may not ever need to use. To implement this hack, perform the following the following steps.

1. With Firefox up and running, type about:config and hit enter.
2. Find “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers” and instead of the -1 setting, change it to 0 and hit Enter.
3. Restart your browser.


Before using this hack I went to Cnn.com and entered 10 different articles but never touched the back button, just using links. Upon the 10th article, Firefox was using 41Mb. I performed the hack and performed the same step by visiting the same sites with a cleared Cache, and memory usage was down to 33.7 Mb. This value never changed even after a few minutes left idle on the final page. Verdict: not a large saving with a slight decrease in browser rendering speed, worth it if you are ram limited.