Downgrading size and quality are actually upgrades - you're square performs as well (quality) or better (size), plus you get money faster (+0.5 per upgrade). Save up after that until you can buy all speed/energy/complete game downgrades at once.
Had game open for an hour, played it off and on. Afterwards, closed the tab, and Firefox released 500,000 of the 600,000k memory it was using. Also, FF CPU usage went from 50% to 0.