Resource Monitor Feedback & Discussion

[tthorne]

We're Building Something New – We'd Like Your Input

Hey everyone,

I'm Tyler, PM for Firefox Performance. Lately, resource usage (CPU & RAM) and better tab management have become some of the most prominent topics in this community; to help address these, we're building an interface that gives you more transparency and control over resource usage, especially as dozens (or even hundreds 😉) of tabs accumulate.

We'd like your input while it's still taking shape.

What We're Building (as seen on the Firefox Public Roadmap)

Resource Monitor: a sidebar panel that shows RAM and CPU usage per tab, grouped by site, sorted automatically by cost to your device. From there, you can unload or close a tab (or group of tabs) to reclaim resources.

🔍‌Check out the screenshot below to see what we have so far.

The goal of Resource Monitor is to empower you to take decisive action without needing to break your browsing flow. This is what differentiates RM from about:processes today: sidebar persistence, tab-level focus, in-line & bulk action buttons. We have several exciting ideas in the pipeline for V2+, but this is the heart of Resource Monitor: lightweight transparency and actionability.

What We Want to Know

We're still in development, which means this is the right moment for your input to actually influence the shape of this shiny new thing we're crafting.

Our prepared questions:

1. When the browser starts dragging: what do you actually want to know first? Which tab is the problem, which site, or just a general "how can I un-slow this thing" recommendation? Something else?
2. Unload vs. close: which matters more to you in the moment? Unloading saves resources while keeping the tab; close is more permanent, but makes the tab list leaner. Curious which flow people prefer.
3. How frequently would you use a tool like this? e.g. one or more times/session, only when something starts to feel off, etc.

Anything else:

Feel free to share any other thoughts or feedback. I'll be watching this thread in the coming weeks. Closely 👀.

Lastly, I'll update this thread as Resource Monitor progresses and lands in Nightly. Thanks for weighing in – our community is a big part of what keeps us moving in the right direction.

Stay cool out there,
-Tyler

P.S. I'll be at this week's community call. Stop by if you want to hear more on this. Monthly Community Call - July 29, 2026 at 5PM UTC 

[Kvin]

Hi, it's great that you're developing a tool like this.

I have a few questions

I'd really like to see a full-featured sleep function for tabs in Firefox, so that I can choose how long it takes for tabs to automatically go to sleep, an option to automatically unload tabs based on memory usage, so that the tab previews show how many MB of memory have been saved—just like in Chromium-based browsers—and options to automatically keep pinned tabs, tabs playing audio, and so on from being unloaded.
It would be great if such a fully functional sleep feature were implemented 🙏

In the mobile version of Firefox, I really want tabs not to be automatically unloaded when the browser is minimized—this is very important 🙏 I can’t use the mobile version of the browser because of this(

Thank you very much!

[tthorne]

Thank you for this. You hit on a couple of helpful themes here.

Desktop: yes. Auto-unload with real controls (how long before a tab sleeps, exemptions for pinned tabs and anything playing audio) is exactly the direction we're headed for what comes after this first version of Resource Monitor. And the memory-saved number in the tab preview is a nice touch – makes the action taken feel more transparent, less magical.

Android: hearing you that aggressive tab unloading is a real blocker to using our app, not just an annoyance. The Android team is actively working on how tabs get killed and reloaded. I don't want to overclaim the timeline or solutions there, but the work is in progress, and getting mobile backgrounding right matters to me personally, as an occasionally perturbed Android user myself.

[Mkn]

Hi, that's interesting, i think this will be a handy tool...

Will the icon for this tool also be visible on the toolbar, next to the Firefox buttons and the extension buttons?
For example, if I don’t use the sidebar and don’t want to, will I be able to access this tool from the button next to the extensions on the toolbar, so I don’t have to open the sidebar just for this tool?

Will this tool and the tab sleep feature also be implemented in the mobile version of Firefox?

Will this tool or any other new feature include a resource limiter, like in Opera GX or Edge?

I’d like to see a tab archiving feature for the desktop version, you already have this feature in the mobile version, so can you port it to the desktop version? The idea behind this feature is that if you haven’t visited or used certain tabs for a long time, they’ll be automatically closed after a week or a month and moved to the archive of inactive tabs.

But I’d really like to see Firefox itself optimized so that it loads pages quickly and uses fewer resources, because unfortunately it lags behind Сhromium-based browsers(

Thank you!

[tthorne]

Thank you for both the high level and targeted points here. I’ll try to hit them each individually.

1. Sidebar-only access: totally fair. Flagged this as a discoverability and adoption barrier.
2. Resource limiter: absolutely. I see preemptive control as a core part of what comes next, not a nice-to-have.
3. Tab archiving: interesting callout. If I’m understanding you correctly, something like this could nest into the resource limits framework, where you'd set some parameters on time, not just an overall numerical limit. Open question on what the actual mechanism looks like.
4. Mobile port and tab sleeping: an Android implementation of Resource Monitor is on my longer-range roadmap. That’s all I can say for now.
5. Firefox lagging behind Chromium: heard. And, transparently, I agree there’s work to be done. Doing that work right is what grounds my optimism with urgency. It also, every now and then, keeps me up at night.

[zb226]

Hi,

that looks like a nice feature!

1. When the browser starts dragging: what do you actually want to know first? Which tab is the problem, which site, or just a general "how can I un-slow this thing" recommendation? Something else?

Which tabs (and in consequence which sites) are hogging resources is the valuable information. Users can then just close offending tabs (and maybe avoid the offending sites).

2. Unload vs. close: which matters more to you in the moment? Unloading saves resources while keeping the tab; close is more permanent, but makes the tab list leaner. Curious which flow people prefer.

Tab hoarders don't like closing tabs 😉 so unload would be preferred.

3. How frequently would you use a tool like this? e.g. one or more times/session, only when something starts to feel off, etc.

When I notice Firefox using obscene amounts of RAM. However, seeing that this kinda resembles the vertical taskbar... I could also see myself using this most of the time 😉

[tthorne]

Right on. Thanks for the itemized input. Your note on this resembling vertical tabs resonates. Internal discussions on this are ongoing, and lively.

“Tab hoarders don’t like closing tabs”. Well said – I walked right into that one.