about:addons-memory shows RAM statistics about installed add-ons

Mar 22, 2013 20:41 GMT  ·  By

Although some may blame Firefox for consuming system resources, most of the times the culprit is one of the add-ons installed.

In order to determine how much memory each add-on uses, you might find about:addons-memory pretty useful. It is an add-on, so it does require RAM to function, but it includes it in the statistics and, from what we’ve seen, it’s less than 1MB.

Restarting the web browser is not required after installation and you can put its name in the address bar to see the details. The data is presented both in raw figures and in percentage and there is also a graphical bar to compare the memory used by each entry.

There is a downside, though, as the add-on cannot provide accurate details about all the entries in the list. This is because some of them “may include static or dynamic overlays that may add scripts, DOM or styles directly to the browser.”

Since these cannot be separated from the browser, the memory used by such an extension may be well above the reported value.

about:addons-memory is designed to help you nab the extensions that increase their memory requirements on a constant basis.