memory

[Anonym2025]

I have been a loyal firefox user for many years, but you are about to lose me.  I have to keep task manager on the screen to make sure that firefox is not going to overload memory.  I've tried everything.  I use firefox because I thought it was secure, but how can it be secure when it has all these unknown processes running? 

[jscher2000]

Hi, Firefox has a built-in task manager to track down which tabs/sites and which internal processes are using a lot of resources. You can call that up using Shift+Esc, or type/paste about:processes in the address bar and press Enter/Return to load the page.

If you are on Windows, the system task manager has a Details panel which lists the process ID for each firefox.exe process (in Windows 7, it was the Processes tab). You can check that all the processes listed in the Windows Task Manager are also listed in Firefox's about:processes page. If Windows has more, it could indicate a hidden instance of Firefox running (usually a very bad sign).

[MrWhooper]

I've been having the exact same problem for over a year now. Even with just one inactive tab open in the background if you leave the browser running too long it will continuously allocate itself more and more system memory until it hits 99% and windows crashes. I usually have to close firefox with task manager before I launch any games or they'll be fighting over ram with firefox and eventually the game will crash. I don't run a bunch of intensive extensions; just ublock and a translator extension for languages that firefox's built in translator doesn't support that I rarely turn on. During normal browsing it starts off at a normal 1-2 gigs of ram. Chrome with the same extensions will happily sit in that range all day with 20 tabs open. After an hour or two firefox it will have crept up to 4-5 gigs, which is enough to start interfering with other more intensive programs you might be running with only 16 gigs available for most people. But even if you have more, more ram isn't a solution because it will keep climbing all the way up until there's not even enough space left for windows. There are TONS of posts about this on here and elsewhere, but I've never seen mozilla really acknowledge that it is, or even could be a problem with their browser, let alone some reassurance that they're working to fix it. Always just the same response about using firefox's task manager to track down what's using the memory, with no real followup. which is pretty useless as the task manager just points to tabs taking up excessive memory with no real details, while the same tabs can be ran all day on chrome at 1-2 gigs of ram. Mozilla's responses to this problem are really odd. It almost seems like they're trying to hide something.

[jscher2000]

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@MrWhooper wrote:

Always just the same response about using firefox's task manager to track down what's using the memory, with no real followup. which is pretty useless as the task manager just points to tabs taking up excessive memory with no real details, while the same tabs can be ran all day on chrome at 1-2 gigs of ram.

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What pages are in those tabs? Reporting bugs about excessive memory usage on particular sites is necessary to identify and diagnose problems.

[MrWhooper]

It doesn't really make a difference what the tabs are, could be a YouTube video cued up for later could be a simple text based forum, could be something I'm looking at on amazon, could be a blank new tab page. All of them will continuously eat up more and more ram until the entire system crashes if you don't stop it with windows task manager.

[jscher2000]

Unless the page is loading a TON of new content on its own, it doesn't make sense that it would use that much more memory just sitting there. Do you use any add-ons that might be making changes in the pages?

[branman]

Yes it does. Lets say there are ads running on the page. They load new content continuously. I have the exact same issue in version 130 (latest), but have been experiencing this for at least all of 2024..

Doesn't matter what tabs, only that it has an ad section or other that loads dynamic content.

This is just unacceptable memory management... literally 1 tab open over a few days and it will allocate 56GB of my 64GB of ram! ...every time (especially Yahoo.com but any site with ads)

[ThePillenwerfer]

It's strange how for all these reports of Firefox devouring memory I've never had a problem and none of my computers have more than 4GB.  There's 1.8GB in use as I type this and Firefox isn't the only thing that's running.  I'm on 64-bit Linux which may make a difference I suppose.