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overcast

Now if they can only fix the memory leak, that chews up gigs of RAM in only an hour.

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If you can reproduce the issue with a clean profile or in Safe Mode, please file a bug report.

I've narrowed it down to specific webpages - but how can I know if the leak is the pages' fault or the browser's fault?

(Biggest culprits are Discourse forums.. which is a shame b/c I really like the platform)

about:memory will help you there. Save those reports (you can even anonymize them) and include them in a bug report.

You could try leaving the same website open in Chrome

A couple weeks ago I'd've advised reporting those pages with the Pulse extension [1], but it looks like it's recently been retired.

1. https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/pulse

Download Developer Edition https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ (or Nightly), load up the page, and in the browser menu click "Report Site Issue".

>Now if they can only fix the memory leak, that chews up gigs of RAM in only an hour.

I recently quit Firefox on Linux (they no longer support ALSA and require PulseAudio for sound). I used to think FF was a memory hog. Moved to Vivalidi (Chrome based). Consumes more memory and I'm sure it has a memory leak. On FF I would have ~ 30-60 tabs open. On Vivaldi it's 10-20. I have to close Vivaldi every few days to reclaim the memory.

Just curious, because I was thinking of using PulseAudio just for Firefox (which is kind of annoying). What's wrong with PulseAudio? Why did they stop supporting ALSA?

I tried PulseAudio some years ago and could not get everything to work. I'm sure if I really tinkered with settings/config files, I could - but everything was working with ALSA out of the box, so I didn't bother.

Pulseaudio is sold as easier to manage, but for me it simply wasn't.

The assumption is that people are running systemd, and Pulseaudio presumably works well with that. But I'm not on systemd. If my distribution had a simple way of running pulseaudio and have it work more or less right out of the box, I'd go for it. But it doesn't.

They stopped supporting it because no developer stepped up to support it - that's all. Apparently the Pulseaudio API is straightforward for developers, whereas dealing with ALSA directly is not.

Depending on how many gigs we're talking about why would this be a bad thing?

It's not necessarily the RAM usage, is that as it consumes, the browser grinds to a halt. Happens every time, no matter what I have open. Particularly in MacOS.

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