Firefox has a few different settings that automatically get tuned based on the system ram. This is all great if you're running nothing besides Firefox, but when you're running half a dozen apps at the same time and they all assume that they can take a decent chunk of mem it just kills the box.

Example settings:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.memory.capacity

How can I make Firefox automatically configure all these settings with the assumption that I only have 512MB of memory instead of 4GB (or whatever number, but you get the idea).

I am running Ubuntu 12.04 with Firefox 14

Current workarounds:

Running a Windows XP virtual machine with 512MB of ram.

It actually runs smooth and takes less memory (including Windows) to run than having Firefox (or Chrome for that matter) run standalone.

Install the 32 bit version of Firefox

By installing the 32 bit version of firefox (apt-get install firefox:i386) the base memory usage is only about 50% of what it is with the 64 bit.