Firefox should suspend tabs to better performance

[EduardoBernal]

Firefox isn't with useful tool, which is tabs suspender, it saves of much hardware consume and doesn't allow your PC stay slowness and/or your own internet, because tabs can consume internet and recourses in background without you use it, so that's important and should be in all popular browsers including Firefox. I recommend they base on auto tab discard and possibly performance tool (by Microsoft Edge), because auto tab discard extension is really complete and very useful, mainly it saves where you stop on certain time video and performance tool saves much your recourses on your computer and is very efficient:

[finanpb]

up

[Matvex]

I recently decided to give Microsoft Edge a try, after reading some positive reviews since its last updates. I was impressed by the way it manages RAM memory. I made some tests: same number of tabs open, no extensions, fresh installed Firefox consumes at least 500/700 MB, sometimes even 1 GB more memory than Edge. I think it has to do with the way Edge manages tabs that are opened in the background, it somehow puts them to sleep almost immediately and more efficiently. Edge has specific settings to manage sleeping tabs, you can set for example after how much time they go to sleep, something that is missing in Firefox. I know there is the about:unloads tool in Firefox which does something similar, but you have to do it manually. So I would like to know if it is possible to set the unload feature in a way that automatically put unused tab to sleep after a set time, in order to save memory and reduce energy consumption. If this feature is not available, please consider this as an idea for a next feature. Many thanks

[robs]

Firefox really needs this feature. Please implement it.

[_wojtek]

Sleeping tab would be awesome!

[AnnoyingOrange]

when Firefox implements this, I will immediately switch from edge to it

[BITL]

I proposed sleeping tabs a few years ago, yet here we are 3-4 years later and nothing has been done about it. A friend of mine is a senior (retired) software developer and told me they can be put into sleep mode by default, and be activated by choice (sort of like we can turn sound on and off in the menu tab) and in that way save on slowing the whole system down. And he said it's not difficult to do either.

The tabs are constantly active in the background even if they're unopened and saved for Restore. For example, now I have only 3 tabs open but in Task Manager 15 FF tabs are shown active, taking up over 1Gb in memory. They siphon so much memory, CPU and power usage. You shouldn't have to disable restore to minimise this pointless amount of memory from open tabs. 

I don't know why it's taking them so long to get this feature fixed when it should be top priority and causes so many crashes, slowdowns and problems. 🙁

[s1fly]

Agreed @BITL these tabs can take a surprising amount of resources and a suspender or whatever you want to call it would allow those with less powerful machines do more.

[s1fly]

In fact while I think about it. There was a conversation with @rupert a while ago about how Mozilla could add AI to Firefox. This would be a great use case. 

Private (ie local running) AI within the Firefox browser could monitor RAM and GPU usage and could actively put tabs to sleep after not being viewed for, say, 15 minutes. It learns how the user and websites are interacting so if you have a tab for Gmail, Chat open, for example, it knows not to sleep those so the user doesn’t miss anything important. However, reference sites that are being used less frequently can be suspended and woken when accessed.

[eturker]

Up. Firefox has bad ram management. This request should be made priority for this reason. 

[pbzin]

Seeing that in a recent survey most users have 4g this should be a priority, in mine with 6gb  Seeing that in a recent survey most users have 4g this should be a priority, on mine with 6gb it is enough to experience crashes due to high RAM consumption

Unloading should be the same as Edge, page should not have to reload after tab unloads

[dcaravana]

Just replied to this tweet:

https://twitter.com/firefox/status/1740820986058990069

by listing the top tab-management ideas here on Connect:

https://twitter.com/dcaravana/status/1741835801174966365

https://twitter.com/dcaravana/status/1741837180975059416

You guys could do the same maybe.

[ssssaaaaaaa]

I might have been said in the thread already, but I read another thread about this and it would be great if it kicked in/became more agressive the more tabs you have open &/ depending on your systems ability (fx. more agressive on older/low-RAM devices).

[SKYC]

This is a very necessary feature be sure to consider its feasibility and implement it as soon as possible please😊

[VictorBrooks]

This will be a life saving feature for a tab junky like myself. I have 50-100 open tabs on average (I know it's bad). Chrome was managing this rather efficiently (offloading tabs almost immediately).
Since the internet speed is fast nowadays, it wasn't a problem to reload a tab once opened again.
I hope Firefox will find a way to pause/suspend tabs more aggressive.

[khdddh11111]

Yes, agreed, fr, the tab sleep feature is a requirement now, hoping it is taken seriously and implemented asap.