Most software in general has hard to detect issues after several weeks of uptime. Its something that's fundamentally hard to test and fix. Its a big reason why "did you turn it off and on again" is such universal advice.
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
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People really out here treating their web browser like it's a mainframe
Even if the software was perfect, virtually all desktop RAM isn't ECC equipped, so you potentially have even the hardware corrupting the state and requiring restarting because of that.
Are we all going to ignore this person had Firefox open for weeks?
Why is that unusual? The only time I close apps is when I restart for an update like once or twice a month.
And your computer is running THE WHOLE TIME?
No of course not, sleep + hibernate after awhile in sleep mode is the default on windows.
Yes it happens. As others have said: just restart.
What might not be as clear: when you restart, if it doesn't just come up and offer to restore your session, you can go to History and Restore Previous Session. This reopens all your tabs (actually, they won't fully reload until you view them).
Or just use bookmarks like a normal person
Bookmarks are for really important stuff. Open tabs are for stuff I want to be able to easily stumble back upon, but I won't be butthurt if I dont.
There's nothing wrong with having more than one way to categorize stuff.
Edit: and considering that session data is also written to disk, there really isn't much difference between bookmarks and open tabs anyway.
There is, when your way consumes resources absurdly.
It doesn't. When you reset it, they take very little resources until you actually load them.
Most non-technical users do this and then complain to IT because their computer doesn't work well. That resource is wasted.
they have an entirely different use case
Close everything and start fresh
Your productivity shouldn't rely on keeping one piece of software running for long periods of time.
I've had this for years, I just exit and restart.
Under about:unloads, you will see a list of open tabs, sorted by resource usage. You can click-spam the "Unload" button until that list is empty, or until the most resource-intensive tabs are off the list.
This does not require any third-party dependencies, and the tab will still be present on top. The site will reload once the tab is selected again.
This is some S tier trolling.
What?
Listen, not even Dexter is the kind of person to leave thirty tabs open for two weeks. You would have to be some kind of insane serial killer to do stuff like that.
Come on 30 tabs is nothing, read the bug report. The guy in the bug report open about a 1000 in totals, I don't even know how to keep up with that many tabs.
Lol, guess I'm an insane serial killer then!
I currently have a bit over 2400 tabs open, and it has been roughly a month since I restarted firefox for being too laggy. It is becoming an issue again.
Seek help...
No one can help him. We tried. He has more Firefox tabs than days left on earth. It's horrible, and I'm looking forward to visiting him one day and resetting everything.
I had the same problem recently. Especially the youtube UI became very unresponsive and would take several seconds to respond. I have 96G ram...
I downloaded ESR instead. So far so good.
Only the part with youtube. Don't know if they are pulling some tricks on uBlock users, but about 10 tabs of youtube can get nasty, even with a somewhat recent workstation.
It's either you need more RAM or you must learn to use a tab group extension. Also, if it gets slow, just restart it.
Simple Tab Groups is a nice add-on.
My personal favourite is Sidebery. It has vertical tabs and easily navigatable via mouse wheel. You can even unload a tab. And has tons of customization options.
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.
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.
which OS do you have? maybe parts of firefox have been moved to swap or compressed memory
Windows 11.