Paul Jacobson

Life and its many opportunities

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Oh Firefox, You Little Resource Hog

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

https://twitter.com/firefox/status/974796585778450433

Photo by ideadad on Unsplash

7 responses

  1. Mladen avatar
    Mladen

    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…

    Reply
    1. Paul avatar
      Paul

      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.

      Reply
  2. Will Reynolds Young avatar
    Will Reynolds Young

    Is this with the new version I keep hearing about Quantum, I think?

    Reply
  3. Paul Jacobson avatar
    Paul Jacobson

    It’s a tremendous improvement in terms of performance. My config seems to be a bit of a resource hog, though.

    Reply
  4. Nathan Jeffery avatar
    Nathan Jeffery

    The devs on my team frequently complain about FF eating RAM but still prefer it for dev work.

    Reply
    1. Paul avatar
      Paul

      Fortunately my work laptop has 16GB of RAM but it would be great not to have to use it all in Firefox.

      Reply
  5. NanoTechnicianHQ avatar
    NanoTechnicianHQ

    I don’t like it, I stream and encode video overlays on the fly and need a browser and 1.529 GB is appalling ontop of playing a game. It’s a shame there’s no way to run it in a streamer mode or lightweight mode/profile.

    Reply

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