I love using Firefox as my primary browser. I prefer using it for a variety of reasons. Lately, though, I’ve noticed that it’s become a bit of a resource hog, and I can’t work out why? I’ve disabled add-ons that I don’t need, and it still uses about 1.4GB of RAM at a minimum for pages that Chrome uses a quarter of RAM for.
Has something changed in Firefox’s architecture? One thought I had is that maybe this has to do with something like page pre-fetching (I think Firefox does that), or something along those lines. I want to sort this out. Chrome seems to be so much better at resource management at the moment.
Update (2018-03-18): Mozilla shared this page to help troubleshoot Firefox memory issues: Firefox uses too much memory (RAM) – How to fix | Firefox Help
Common troubleshooting steps support recommends here: https://t.co/qkud0mjJgV however, on Nightly there is a new update every day. The best way to report performance issues: https://t.co/1Yv931ti9u – RM https://t.co/kz8t3XLC7k
— Firefox 🔥 (@firefox) March 16, 2018
Hey Paul actually Firefox released a brand new (supposedly really fast) version in late 2017. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/fast-for-good-launching-the-new-firefox-into-the-world/
So it’s strange that it’s such a resource hug for you. Although it’s possible it uses more memory for more speed…
I’m using v59 Stable and v60 Developer Edition. It runs pretty well on my MacBook Pro but I noticed it uses 1.3GB Ram minimum. I’ll try a refresh and see if that helps.
Is this with the new version I keep hearing about Quantum, I think?
Kyle, TX
It’s a tremendous improvement in terms of performance. My config seems to be a bit of a resource hog, though.
The devs on my team frequently complain about FF eating RAM but still prefer it for dev work.
Fortunately my work laptop has 16GB of RAM but it would be great not to have to use it all in Firefox.