firefox CPU usage

[prophetik]

i've noticed that firefox uses a pretty large amount of memory and cpu at any given time. my roommate told me that he found some stuff online that let you tweak the settings of firefox and let it run faster...anyone know what would make it do that?

[Pyrion]

To my knowledge, the only things that make Firefox consume a lot of CPU are animated gifs and large page loads (such as any thread of over a couple hundred replies on this forum when viewing them in hybrid or threaded mode). It can't be avoided, just ameliorated to an extent by upgrading one's CPU.

Memory usage can be tweaked, somewhat, in about:config under browser.cache.memory.capacity (and whether or not you want to enable memory caching via browser.cache.memory.enable). Otherwise, downgrade to a version before 2.0 as Firefox noticeably consumed much more memory at and after 2.0 than before.

[phill]

To my knowledge, the only things that make Firefox consume a lot of CPU are animated gifs and large page loads

At times, embedded elements can cause high cpu usage as well. Be it java applets, flash, active x, etc.