Is there a way to "refresh" firefox without having to restart it?

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
67,201
12,029
126
www.anyf.ca
I find after a while Firefox gets very sluggish, where opening a new tab will just result in a white page with the circle in the middle, instead of actually loading the page I wanted to open. Or things will randomly stop responding, ex: clicking on links won't be clickable. It just gets horrible. I installed more ram in my computer hoping it would fix the issue but it has not. Once it grows to using about 10GB of ram it just gets brutal to use. The issue with Firefox is it does not properly clear up memory and is very leaky.

When I'm coding I have lot of windows open and they are all placed strategically. I really don't want to have to redo all of that each time. Is there a way to refresh it, but without restarting it? I just want it to release all the memory that it's held up, and be faster again. Even if I close most tabs it still stays sluggish and it gets worse over time. Usually end up having to restart it every couple weeks. Really annoying.

I have found that in some oddball situations such as a full OS crash or forced reboot, it will actually remember all the windows. Is there perhaps a way to force that to happen but without the crash/reboot?
 

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
67,201
12,029
126
www.anyf.ca
So I found in preferences if I check "restore previous session" under Startup (near top) and then do file/quit, it seems to work the way I want. When I open it again it will open everything back the way it was.