I’ve been a devout Firefox user since Phoenix. That is until this past week. Tiring of its horrible CPU spikes and insatiable hunger for memory, I contemplated switching to Opera. The only thing that kept me from making the transition was Opera’s lack of an Xmarks plug-in. Not being able to use my favorite Bookmarks manager killed any hope of an alternate browser on my computers.

sudo rm -rf ~/lawn/kids*

99% CPU spikes and 350+ MB memory usage are unacceptable, but when using Firefox 3.0 they’re an every day experience. With all hope lost, I installed the latest Firefox beta. Since then, Firefox has yet to exceed 75% CPU utilization or consume more than 225 MB of memory. All this, even while watching the latest high-def SWTOR cinematic trailer (which is awesome btw). JavaScript heavy websites still consume resources, but with much less cost.

Years ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice about installing a beta, but time has eroded my brazen disregard for a stable computer. Firefox Beta 4 may not restore your youth, but it will reallocate your memory. Thank you, Mozilla!

If you’re like me then you’re constantly thinking of new ways to tweak Mozilla Firefox. This morning I installed an addon called Vertigo. This extension stacks Firefox tabs vertically on the left-hand side of your browser. It worked well enough, but I soon grew tired of having to click twice to a close a tab.

I uninstalled Vertigo and with it went the close button on each of my tabs. To fix this I opened up Firefox’s advanced configuration by typing about:config in the address bar. I filtered by browser.tabs.closeButton and changed the integer value to 1.

The close buttons immediately reappeared. Alakazam!

For the curious:

0 - Close button on active tab only.
1 - Close button on every tab.
2 - No close buttons.
3 - Close button at the end of the tab bar (ala Firefox 1.5).