On Mon, 4 Dec 2017 04:21:05 +0000, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

Anyhow, I need to downgrade to some version of FF between 18 and 47. I'm
not sure what version is the best, which will eliminate the extreme
drain on resources, and still run most current websites. Any
suggestions?

Hmm. I run version 26; this still has difficulty with _some_ sites
(though that _could_ be some of the settings and add-ons I have). With
thirty-odd tabs open, I find it still does the slowdown (though I'd say
after rather more than two hours), but I find closing and reopening it
usually speeds it up again - I don't clear the cache (if I ever knew how
to, I've forgotten). If I think things are a bit slow, I have a look in
Task Manager and sort by memory usage - if Firefox is hogging a lot,
then it's time to restart it.

This could give you a mid-point in your researches. (26 or 27 is the
last before one of the major changes in user interface - Atlantis,
Australis, something like that.) I'd not run XP-with-Firefox with less
than 1.5G RAM these days.
--

Some sites are just plain lousy. I think some of the people who create
webpages have no clue what they are doing. When I go on sites that cause
problems, I usually just pass and move on to another site. There are
plenty sites, why fuss with bad ones...

I'll check on ver 26 or 27. That sounds like a compromise.

To clear the cache, on the older versions go to TOOLS, and there's a
button "Clear Recent History". On the newer versions (such as 47), go to
HISTORY and look for the same....
You can select if you want to clear the Cache, clear cookies, and a
bunch of other stuff. The "cache" is the main thing to clear. Not only
does it slow stuff down on FF, but it uses a lot of drive space. When I
only had a 40gb drive and was low on drive space, clearing the cache
gained me over 1gb.

If I recall, ver 18 still had the cache clearing in the TOOLS.