If you love Mozilla Firefox but hate the brain drain on your computer, then you are not alone. Millions of Firefox’s loyal users are frustrated with the browser’s strange idiosyncrasy. But what can you do to prevent Firefox from eating your computer’s memory? Try one of these four tricks!

Plugins and add-ons

Sometimes simple things can muck up the works. On Firefox you can customize it many different ways. However, those customizations can be one of the causes of a memory drain. Things like themes, extensions and plugins can make Firefox run slow. To solve this problem, remove as many unnecessary add-ons as you can.

On MozillaZine one user said: “I was using 7 extensions for Firefox, with no theme at all and my browser would sit, three tabs open, my website, admin panel and Netvibes. 200MB utilization. Seemed a bit odd. Got rid of the extensions I didn’t need and bam my computer went back to a reasonable number, 50mb.”

Look-see

Mozilla offers a place to go for tips and help: MozillaZine. The site also offers a problematic extensions list for Firefox. The list illustrates extension-specific conflicts and information. See if you can improve your memory by changing a few plugins to more economical settings.

If you’re curious to learn what, really, is eating up your memory in Mozilla Firefox you can type about:cache?device=memory in your browser window. Once the page comes up it will give you detailed memory usage that you can use to determine what needs to happen.

Off switch

One of the great points of Firefox is the auto save feature. Whenever your browser closes unexpectedly, Firefox automatically saves your tabs to be reopened next time Firefox resumes. You can use this. If your memory usage is getting too high, simply shut it down.

All the pretty pictures

Flash elements, or all the pretty pictures, are what frequently cause Firefox’s memory drain. This usually occurs worst when you leave a lot of tabs open for an extended amount of time. To avoid this, either shut your tabs down when you are not using them or… Kill the flash. Just go to your task manager and find flash listed in the running programs. End it and you’ll soon be back in business. Of course, some of the sites will look pretty bad, but that’s the price you have to pay for speed.

It doesn’t matter that Firefox has issues; we still love to use it. Thankfully, Mozilla and company are constantly working to improve the program. Maybe one day memory drain will no longer be an issue. Until then, try these four tricks to keep your computer speeding along.

Sara is an active nanny as well as an active freelance writer. She is a frequent contributor of nanny agency.  Learn more about her at: http://www.nannypro.com/blog/sara-dawkins/.