I have this love hate relationship with Firefox at the moment, as regular readers will remember from previous posts. I’m addicted to the superb range of addons which can transform the browser into a veritable Swiss knife of value, but on the other hand the inability of the Mozilla team to fix long term bugs and speed the browser up is really –  REALLY –  frustrating. How hard can it be to sort out things like the memory leak after all these years? Well now maybe we can find out.

Firemin is a cool piece of freeware which promises to optimize Firefox by improving its memory footprint and thereby improve the speed and stability over long periods of heavy surfing. If you’ve ever done a long stint with lots of tabs open in Firefox, you’ll know how frustrating it is as the browser gets slower and slower and eventually stutters to a halt. Well the good news is Firemin does seem to stop that stuff happening.

The program seems to accomplish its miracle by paging out of memory to disk more often, so the result can be a slower running Firefox at times, which is why the solution may not be perfect for everyone. I use it from time to time and it does seem to improve matters though. I also like the fact that you can optimize the Firefox database with one click, which should deliver another performance boost. And yes for all those of you shouting ‘switch to Chrome’ at the screen, I’m trying to avoid it unless I have to. I’m too much in debt to Google already, and there are addons on Firefox which Chrome doesn’t have (Scrapbook+ for instance).

Still and all, this looks like a useful utility to run on you machine, and for me it’s definitely a keeper. I’d be interested to hear if you know of any alternatives out there to compare.

 Firemin (Formerly Firefox Plumber); simply put; it will eliminate most memory leaks in Firefox. All we did was tweaked our memory optimization engine a little and applied it to Firefox and most memory leaks was gone. To use Firemin; you will need to unzip firemin.zip and double click on Firemin.exe and let it babysit Firefox. You expected it to be more complicated, we are truly sorry to disappoint you.