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Firefox becomes slow after a couple of weeks open
(bugzilla.mozilla.org)
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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
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Dawg I had like ~35 tabs open and hadn't restarted my PC in over three weeks. Fucking Firefox was sucking back 80 gigs of RAM. 80 fucking gigs.
On the bright side all the tabs were still loaded when I clicked through them.
I've seen poorly made websites taking gigabytes of RAM before. It's not firefox' fault they do that.
True that, I just thought it was crazy. I had recently upgraded to 96 gigs of RAM and I just never imagined a browser would actually suck up that much.
If you had 80GB worth of websites that did something actually useful with it, you'd want Firefox to use it all.
I usually have dozens of tabs loaded due to usage and I want Firefox to keep all of them into memory so that I can switch between them quicker.
Though I do also want Firefox to shed load by unloading some of them whe I need memory for something else. There just simply isn't a mechanism in Linux to do that AFAIK; Firefox will happily keep all of its tabs loaded all the way until OOM eventhough it could shed most of them with little impact on user experience. There isn't a way for the kernel to ask applications to shed memory load on their own and I think there should be.
macOS has such a mechanism and Firefox uses it but it didn't have much effect IME, so it might have been bugged. That was a good while ago that I tested it though.
Edit: I just found out that there actually is a sort of standard mechanism now: https://systemd.io/MEMORY_PRESSURE/
I don't think firefox implements it but it's also kinda new.
I can't wait for Servo to be finished so I can move away from Firefox, it uses way too much memory.
Servo won't protect you against shitty websites gobbling up memory.
It will still lower memory usage considerably, Firefox uses way more memory than Chrome. Memory optimization is horrible in Firefox.
[citation needed]
I test firefox vs edge in my pc, both with ublock origin. Firefox noticeably uses more ram than edge which uses same engine as chrome.
Here this person saw the same results as me: https://libreddit.bus-hit.me/r/firefox/comments/18gp19l/ram_usage_in_firefox_vs_edge
Their methodology (and therefore likely yours aswell) is flawed and it was immediately pointed out in that thread too: https://libreddit.bus-hit.me/r/firefox/comments/18gp19l/ram_usage_in_firefox_vs_edge/kd2u2pq/?context=3#kd2u2pq
Measuring the memory "a process" actually "uses" is not trivial.
Your image doesn't load for me.
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/28a27e7a-4de6-4ab3-a1a1-27cd13ef0ef7.gif https://media1.tenor.com/m/v6Awsd0YO7IAAAAd/metal-gear-rising-metal-gear-rising-revengeance.gif
I'm so hyped as well! Just read their monthly update blog today actually! I'm mostly hyped because it's the first actual new web browser in a very, very long time, and that's just plain exciting!
There are two new browsers coming Servo written in Rust and Ladybird (web browser) written in Swift. Lets see which one will win. Ladybird alpha is coming in 2026 and they have more funding.
Oh awesome, I didn't even know about this other project. Thanks for letting me know.