Does anyone have this issue were firefox becomes slow if left open for a long time. In my case after a couple of weeks rendering becomes slow and when I use youtube for example if is laggy, just trying to change volume taka few second to show the volume bar. It also happens to my laptop at work. I have around 30 tabs open.
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.
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.
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.
Lol, guess I’m an insane serial killer then!
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.
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.
I don’t hold anything against you, OP, but… 30 tabs open for two weeks makes me feel yucky on the inside.
Hahajahajaha
I have like 90?
Sorry, eh. (Yea, I know I shouldn’t, but I’m lazy)
Lol I open them to look at later, and I also open lots songs on youtube to listen to and switch between songs rather than reopen the songs over and over I just keep it open.
Oh, the 20 tabs thing is perfectly reasonable. But I’m one of those crazy people who completely shuts down his computer every night, including closing my browser. Been using computers for too many years to trust a browser to not leak memory.
You can bookmark webpages to come back to later and even organize them in trees by category. You can ceeate a playlist of songs from youtube and import it to a service with no ads like piped, then shuffle it. If you’re willing to put up with 30+ open tabs these are much less time consuming than scrolling through the default way it situates tabs, AND there aren’t 30 open tabs sucking your resources.
If you already knew all this, I’m almost sorry.
I’m almost sorry
Hahahahaha oh boy the comments here today are great!
(I’m one of those who never reboots, never closes Firefox).
Personally, if I bookmark something, the odds of ever getting back to it are very, very low, and so are the odds of deleting obsolete bookmarks of unread news etc. But the songs tips are great, I’ll have to look into it, thank you!
And 30 tabs is very tame.
I do have bookmarks for music too, I used to open more than 30. I now bookmark lot of them. Trying to reduce numbers of tabs little by little, I used to open so many tabs that I got an arrow and had to press it to reach the other tabs.
I am still sane compared to these people:
https://libreddit.projectsegfau.lt/r/chrome/comments/ev9fi9/so_how_many_tabs_do_you_have_open
Yeah, I get twitchy when I have more than about ten tabs open. My senior regularly has thousands, across multiple browser windows. There are two types of people.
I have multiple Firefox windows with around 1-1.5k tabs on each, and they have been opened (and re opened) since about a year.
I ❤️ tabs, they make me feel all warm on the inside
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
they have an entirely different use case
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.
just close it
I ran into the same issue on my PC.
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.
which OS do you have? maybe parts of firefox have been moved to swap or compressed memory
Windows 11.
Try using a tab suspend extension, something like ‘auto tab discard’. Firefox has one built-in, but it’s not aggressive enough.
You can see the worst offenders in firefox by using the hamburger menu then more tools and Task manager. You can sort by ram. YouTube likes to hold gigs of ram for some videos. Close the biggest offenders and you’ll get back close to normal speed.
Ding ding ding, the only good reply in this thread.
The symptoms described by OP smell like good old memory exhaustion.
In my experience this doesn’t matter. Firefox just slows down if it’s been open for long, regardless for how long the tab has been open for. Even if you unload all active tabs and open a new one, that new tab will still be significantly slower than it would be if you restarted the entire browser.
It’s some kind of slow resource leak somewhere.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/
I’ve got more than 30 open tabs, though in practice I don’t actually need ALL those tabs loaded. The extension unloads inactive tabs after a configurable time. You can also configure the extension so that pinned tabs are not unloaded, certain domains/URL patterns are not unloaded, etc.
Firefox can automatically discard tabs when available memory gets too short. You need to configure it to do that though and probably disable the 10min minimum open time too if you’re very short on memory.
That’s a healthy solution
FFS, his leak is probably in an extension.
Installing more extensions that might also leak is not a real solution, no matter what they do.
I’ve had this for years, I just exit and restart.
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.
