Detailed Firefox Memory Usage and How to Reduce Memory use Without Restarting

Detailed Firefox Memory Usage and How to Reduce Memory use Without Restarting

Some people might complain that Firefox is a memory hog, especially over a long period of time it consumes large amount of your system memory. When this happen the most quick and easy way everyone is trying to do is close the browser and restart again. True, that might just solve your issue, but for those of you who are curious about why and which tab is exactly consuming so much of memory, here are few ways to optimize the memory usage.
If you go to about:memory from the address bar you can view an extensive tree view on exactly how much of memory is used by Firefox, on what tab, and which task. A nested tree view is presented for each section and areas of the memory consumption.

If you think this is cool, wait. Go to about:memory?verbose you can view even more detailed view on the memory usage.

Manually Trigger Garbage Collection

Try to scroll down to the very bottom of the page, you will also be able to trigger some garbage collection. There are four buttons, Update, GC, CC and Minimize memory usage. Update basically is the same when you try to hit F5, it refresh the page.
GC = Do a global collection.
CC = Do a cycle collection.
Minimize memory usage =  will be simulating sending out notification that triggers garbage collection.

So when you run into Firefox running high on memory again next time, try those methods before just closing it completely.