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Comment by bsbechtel | Hacker News Reader

Since upgrading to the last version (32), Firefox has become a significant resource hog on my machine. It has become considerably worse than any other browser. Has anyone else had this issue?

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For me it's Chrome that has been the resource hog and Firefox that has been a lot more swift. Chrome frequently uses 100% of one of my cpu cores for minutes on end and is very sluggish with creating new tabs (where it's sometimes faster to start up Firefox and use that to search than to open a new tab in Chrome). I'm not quite sure what's going on, but it seems some browsers just occasionally have issues with certain hardware configurations?

That sound like you have a bad extension.

I wish :( I've disabled them all, and checked chrome's internal task manager. It's the "Browser" task that consumes the CPU, and not one of the extension tasks: http://i.imgur.com/FvbDrMc.png

>very sluggish with creating new tabs

There was a bug (https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=409126), but it seems to be fixed. However last comment there hints on another related bug: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=407889

Maybe you have bookmarks with foreign characters on bookmark bar too?

I used to have a large amount of bookmarks on the bookmark bar, which did cause sluggish tab switching. I've recently removed all of those which did improve the tab switching speed, but not the tab creation speed. I should probably do some more hunting through that issue tracker at some point...

I switched back to Firefox recently from Chrome. I find Firefox faster too.

Chrome is losing focus on what was making it great : ultralight and fast.

I'd ditch Chrome if Firefox had full html5 video support on OS X.

https://areweslimyet.com/ would indicate that a lot of the memory efficiency gains have been undone. N. Nethercote no longer writes MemShrink project updates and Snappy is listed under 'old projects' on mozilla wiki. Superficially, it seems like Mozilla has lost interest in the performance aspect of Firefox. I hope the opposite is actually true.

> N. Nethercote no longer writes MemShrink project updates

Nicholas's last memshrink posts were this summer, after the FF32 release...

We're still working just as hard on improving the memory usage of Firefox. We have MemShrink meetings every other week. Our focus on FirefoxOS has made improving memory usage more important than ever.

In the "Meeting Minutes, Progress Reports and Presentations" section of https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink it says the following:

> We no longer take meeting minutes nor make progress reports, but the meetings still happen. Brief MemShrink updates are given in the minutes of the weekly Platform meeting (wiki, blog). And nnethercote still blogs about major MemShrink occurrences.

And in the post marked "The Final Progress Report" I said this:

> I was due to write a MemShrink progress report today, but I’ve decided that after almost 2.5 years, my reserves of enthusiasm for these regular reports has been exhausted. Sorry! I do still plan to write posts when significant fixes relating to memory consumption are made. (For example, when generational GC lands, you’ll hear about it here.) I will also continue to periodically update the MemShrink “big ticket items” list. And MemShrink meetings will continue, so MemShrink-tagged bugs will still be triaged. And for those of you who read the weekly Platform meeting notes, I will continue to write MemShrink updates there. So don’t despair — good things will continue to happen, but they’ll just be marginally less visible.

Time I don't spend writing MemShrink reports is time I can spend on improving Firefox's code.

32 has generally been the lightest Firefox I've had since I switched back from Chrome (~v29).

Have you used about:memory to track it down? The base Firefox 32 is extremely lightweight so you'll probably want to focus on extensions.

Not sure what that is, could you expand or point to a resource where I could learn more? Thanks.

Open the location bar and type "about:memory" – it displays all of the memory usage in Firefox by component so you can look for hot spots.

Once you've opened it, click "Measure" and you'll get a huge tree view of memory allocations. Simply searching for "add-on" should quickly give you an idea of whether you have a known hog like AdBlock Plus or something more subtle.

Thanks. It looks like there is a huge amount of memory devoted to recently opened tabs that are now closed, especially from js heavy sites. I run a session manager extension, so that could be the source of these sites still using resources. I'll try disabling it and seeing if anything changes.

I've had quite the opposite experience. Chrome will use significantly more memory for me. Unfortunately, everything else works better in chrome so I'm sticking with it for now.

In the past I had same experience as you, however this has changed in the past few versions in both browsers. It probably varies from user to user depending on the individual usage.

For me as well. I'm not sure how severe it's for other people, but for me it's quickly climbes to more than 1 GB of my RAM in a couple of pages (probably after I open and close some youtube videos). It could probably be my add-ons, but then it's the browser's responsibility to keep a check on such memory hogging extensions.

I noticed yesterday that my system was sluggish. I went to check on resource usage and Firefox was using 1.5GB. I restarted it and it's currently using 600MB with 14 tabs open (one tab is a one-hour documentary on youtube)

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