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Comment by mohamedattahri | Hacker News Reader

The main problem for me is how memory-hungry this browser is. How can a single tab opened on HN use 500MB?

The memory numbers reported on OSX by the system are a little weird, and include shared libraries in some kind of odd way. If you want to see the breakdown of how much memory the browser is actually using, go to about:memory and click on "Measure". You can mouse over the various categories to get a description.

Either that or you have an addon installed that is using a huge amount of memory.

I have no idea - mine uses 184MB. It's been much slimmer than Chrome for me for about a year. Even when I use lots of extensions, it's up to 340MB which is less than Chrome's 400MB.

Firefox uses less memory only on startup and when I have few tabs open. As soon as I start opening more tabs and browsing longer the memory usage is much larger on FF and the whole UI becomes less responsive and so do pages.

Even on startup it isn't that better compared to chrome.

Chrome 11 extensions 1 tab: ~300MB

FF 2 extensions 1 tab: ~200MB

It's not FF 29, it's 28 - but I doubt the memory management improved much in 29.

But to be fair, it's a lot better now than it used to be.

That surprises me even more, since Chrome has a lot more overhead per tab (often a whole process per tab), so I expected Firefox to have a bigger advantage the more tabs you have open. Edit: I just tried opening about 24 tabs of webcomics in each, and Chrome jumped to over 1GB of RAM while FF is about 600MB.

I don't know if it's just the tab count or longer browsing sessions/history (I usually have my browser open for days without closing it) or whatever, so don't quote me on that.

But FF is definitely uses more memory than chrome and with few other resource hungry applications running it becomes practically unusable on my low end laptop.

Firefox's memory usage has ballooned since FF 13. https://areweslimyet.com/

On my 512MB Raspberry Pi, this used to be FF's greatest strenth. Unfortunately the latest versions are getting nearly as bad as chrome. I wish Mozilla would focus on their strengths and put more resources back into their memshrink project.

I guarantee you that FF29's memory usage is better in general than FF13, because it avoids numerous bad cases where old versions that used to cause memory usage to skyrocket. Those cases -- where memory goes up 10x -- are the ones that hurt. In contrast, you're unlikely to notice 20% higher memory usage during normal use.

20%? Are we even looking at the same charts? After closing 5 tabs 270mb -> 480mb! Those numbers don't lie and your guarantee is worthless to those of us that have seen Firefox's memory bloat over the past year.

When Chrome started to get fat, it was great to have a lightweight alternative like Firefox. But lately even Firefox has been causing my 1GB netbook to thrash. I hate to have to junk a perfectly good machine that is only used for email and browsing just because of software bloat. After doing a factory restore, it looks like that or a lightweight Linux distro(while losing flash and HW accel) are my only options.

areweslimyet is a tool mainly used to prevent regressions during development and shouldn't be interpreted the way you do.

There are many memory usage improvements made in firefox that don't appear explicitly in the areweslimyet tests, and there are many others, like better memory usage reporting accuracy and new features that do, thus the apparent increase in memory usage throughout the latest versions that you pointed.

You mean memory usage has increased slightly, after being dramatically reduced, while adding new features? They're doing better than most large projects.

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