Ha, I should have known better than to rely on decades-old memory and actually look it up.
Back in the days of Windows 9x (maybe continuing into XP and beyond - I haven’t checked) there were ‘memory defrag’ utilities - these would sit in the taskbar and periodically ‘manage’ the memory.
Scare quotes above because what they actually did was to unload/wipe the whole of the computer’s memory - any running programs would react to this by reloading themselves into memory (but in theory, neatly); any fragmented to leaked bits of memory would be freed up.
They sort of worked, in my experience, but they became irrelevant to me when I made the transition to XP and computers with gigabytes of RAM. Not sure if they still exist, and are effective.
Doesn’t Firefox still have memory leaks?
Or… if you are faster using keystrokes press the windows key and M (minimize).
There is a CLEARMEM command that came with the NT Server Resource Kit (it didn’t come standard with Windows). It was still available for Windows around the time of XP and 2003 Server. I don’t know if it is still available.
The main program is not supposed to. But there’s nothing preventing one from being caused by an addon, and Mozilla can’t test every possible configuration once addons are taken into account.
pwned