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Comment by bambam24 | Hacker News Reader

The question for firefox was never been is it fast. The question for firefox was always “why its using 10GB RAM?”

I've literally seen people commenting that they don't use firefox because chrome seems faster. (...and also, how on earth did you get it to use that much memory? I'm sitting over 500 tabs, albeit mostly unloaded, and 6 extensions, on a system with only 6GB installed)

If you have the ram firefox will eat it, I've seen it use well over 10 before. Chromiums do the same thing, though.

BS.

Currently browsing HN, Google groups, Gitlab x2.

Extensions enabled:

Bypass paywall, Decentraleyes, Youtube enhancer, Facebook containers, Flagfox, Google container, HTTPS everywhere, Location guard, Sponsorblock and Ublock Origin

Only using a few hundred MB atm:

https://imgur.com/i6DYG69

You're responding to something I didn't say. GP was talking about memory usage with 500 tabs, with which Firefox will absolutely eat some RAM. Right now I have 200 and it's using 6.3gb.

That's nice. Here's 9GB resident[0] per htop. (Dev edition, four windows -- just under 50 tabs.)

Interestingly, about:performance informs me that the highest single process is a Facebook tab taking 174MB[1], followed by Gmail at 166MB, and only shows total memory usage maybe 3GB. Activity Monitor output looks closer to htop, but shows, e.g., that pid 13691 (top one) as 2.52GB rather than 1.3GB.

Web browsers are complicated, and when someone says "[browser] is using xxx memory on my computer", pointing out that it isn't on yours is in no way a refutation.

At any rate, I've got a lot of memory, and Firefox uses a bunch of it. Sometimes this causes issues, but I also had similar issues in Chrome. (And with vscode. And with Docker. And, to a lesser extent, Slack.) I welcome perf gains on cpu, memory, and subjective responsiveness. All of these matter to me.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/qYnkQuX.png

[1] Note: In the few minutes while I was writing this post, that FB tab rose to 215MB on about:performance, without me switching to it.

Just curious (not being snarky): what is the advantage of kepeing 500 tabs open? How does it work?

I rarely have more than 10 open, and I've been using tabs ever since tabs on browsers were invented. (I was using browsers before tabs existed) I feel I might have missed some trend here.

Since you ask an honest question, I will give an honest answer:

> How does it work?

Poorly.

I do this because I open tabs for a project and then move on to the next thing before I finish, and serializing into a bookmark folder is more work than I'm willing to invest in the moment. I'm trying to get better at keeping work in real tickets but it's still more work than just leaving the tabs out for future-me to come back to.

Ah I see the thinking behind it now. Wouldn’t you lose those tabs if you happen to logout or if the system restarts?

I usually have bookmark folders because I’m always afraid I might fat-finger-close a tab or something.

I'm just using the "Restore previous session" option and it seems to have worked fine. I don't specifically remember losing any sessions in a long time.

I use and love the Panorama View plugin that lets me setup groups of tabs for different project. Then it is easy to switch between groups. It lets me focus the browser on just one project at a time and makes those tabs easier to deal with.

I think for over 500 tabs, one should just use bookmarks. That said, I do have more than 100 tabs open, properly managed through stacked tabs and so forth.

Firefox was born as the light outsider from Mozilla once all non browsing functions were scrapped out.

Good job! My FF with 10+ extensions only use 493mb with 4 tabs opened. What am I doing wrong?

Not enough tabs. :D

Just opening wikipedia pages.

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