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.
If it’s related to the thread you posted then try Nightly?
That’s only in Nightly right now, unfortunately; it won’t make it out to Release until v134.
Also, can I ask why you’d leave your browser open for weeks? Just curious of the use case. The thread mentions having 5700-7000 open tabs, and I can’t fathom why someone would do that. It’s not like the websites disappear if you close the tab. Nothing to do with the problem though, you don’t have to answer.
I only have around 30 open and I don’t turn off the laptop, after a while firefox becomes sluggish and I have to restart it.
You should try that nightly build for troubleshooting purposes
Also, because it forces you to restart the browser every night.
Have you tested with specific websites? Could it be a tab has some have JavaScript running constantly that’s causing the issue?
I haven’t tested it at my home laptops, but my work laptop all tabs become slow. I have to restart it every time.
Also, can I ask why you’d leave your browser open for weeks?
This just begs the question, Why do you not leave it open?
To conserve resources / power? Like when I’m done using an app, I close it. When I’m done reading a website or using online banking, I close it. I don’t leave my email, games or music open after I’m doing using them either. I actually turn off / sleep my entire device when I’m done using it, but that’s not what my curiosity is about.
Sure. Personally I just close the tabs, tho.
Maybe because the software is designed to make that very practical and smooth. You also might point to hardware limitations, should you have a machine that doesn’t have a lot of RAM, or perhaps you might point to simplicity, and that you don’t want to have a cluttered taskbar.
But it’s kind of ironic that you would ask why not leave software open on a post where the problem was specifically mentioned as one that is solved by closing the software.
So perhaps another anecdote is in order. I currently running three instances of Firefox (different profiles) on a low-end Celeron laptop. I don’t usually shut them except sometimes by mistake. What I do do is close tabs, if only for simplicity’s sake (because idle tabs are unloaded from memory anyway). I’m experiencing no sluggishness issues.
some people use tabs as bookmarks 🤷
just close it
What you’re describing is called a resource leak. Something, an extension, a background process, etc., is holding onto resources for too long without cleaning itself up automatically.
This is pretty common in writing code, and extremely difficult to prevent except in closed and well understood systems. A browser is anything but that, due to the nature of needing to work on any website doing whatever they want.
Try using a tab suspend extension, something like ‘auto tab discard’. Firefox has one built-in, but it’s not aggressive enough.
Why would you need your browser, let alone your PC on for weeks without any break
Because I’m doing stuff.
Lol, cause we’re all lazy gits.
Cobbler’s kids have the worst shoes. I’m the cobbler, and reboot when things start acting up.
FaaS: Firefox as a Service
Why would I say goodbye to a good friend?
My laptop with a non-critical service: Uptime: 9 weeks, 5 hours, 34 minutes
I’ve had Debian VMs run for long periods of time without me touching them. They normally would have high uptime unless it automatically reboots to apply a kernel update. The key is these are virtualized servers. You should absolutely avoid running to long without a reboot. The longer you wait the greater the chance of something breaking on the next boot. There is also the issue of memory fragmentation but that’s not really an issue these days.
I just have docker containers serving up some self-hostable service for myself.
I don’t think I’ve seen or heard of issues not rebooting for too long recently. Aside from not getting security updates or bug fixes, what would be some problems that could happen if a system has been running for too long?
It might not come back up after power loss.
Also you do want security updates. It is a bad idea to not install them.
Could you elaborate on it not coming back up after a power loss? Assuming these services can get restarted after booting without the need for a user login, why and how would a previous long uptime lead to a possible failure of these services to be spun back up? I apologize if these questions sound dumb and have obvious answers, but I genuinely do not know, and it’s why I’m asking.
And I’m not in any way trying to say I don’t want security updates. I’m asking that aside from security updates and bug fixes, are there any downsides to a long uptime? Please treat the question as one of curiosity.
It can happen because of simple things such as a hardware failure or because the kernel was removed 3 weeks prior. Its unlikely but it always will come at the worse time.
Also rebooting after any update makes sure that all services have been restarted and are using the newest libraries.
I’m sorry but I fail to see how these problems would be tied to having a long
uptime(note the inline code block, as I mean the output of that command instead of uptime in an SLA, which is typically described as high or low instead of long or short). I have yet to find mentions where long uptime leads to higher chance of hardware failures as of recent. If some critical library or the kernel was removed some weeks prior to a reboot, I don’t think long or short uptimes would change your encounter of these issues.And security patches are good, I agree. But there are instances where you don’t need it, eg in an airtight infrastructure, meant just for internal users, of which has no access to the Internet. You fall back to more traditional approaches to security in such cases.
As far as whether a service is properly restarted due to library updates, in a containerized environment, you wouldn’t have issues with library version mismatches, or missing libraries, or any sort of failure to restart due to dependencies getting changed without human attention (note that you can automate container updates, but you are then putting trust into whoever is publishing that container).
I’m not sure if it’s a lack of understanding of what my question is asking, or some other reason, but if you would please take the time to carefully read my questions and answer more appropriately and with clarity, that would be much appreciated.
which OS do you have? maybe parts of firefox have been moved to swap or compressed memory
Windows 11.
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.
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.
It’s either you need more RAM or you must learn to use a tab group extension. Also, if it gets slow, just restart it.
Simple Tab Groups is a nice add-on.
My personal favourite is Sidebery. It has vertical tabs and easily navigatable via mouse wheel. You can even unload a tab. And has tons of customization options.
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.
I can’t wait for Servo to be finished so I can move away from Firefox, it uses way too much memory.
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.
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.
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.
Most software in general has hard to detect issues after several weeks of uptime. Its something that’s fundamentally hard to test and fix. Its a big reason why “did you turn it off and on again” is such universal advice.
Even if the software was perfect, virtually all desktop RAM isn’t ECC equipped, so you potentially have even the hardware corrupting the state and requiring restarting because of that.
People really out here treating their web browser like it’s a mainframe
Are we all going to ignore this person had Firefox open for weeks?
Yes.
Stop trying to shame people for using their damn computer.
Seems like a waste of electricity to me
I’m pretty sure sleep more uses more energy than turning the machine off when it’s not in use
Stop downvoting people who treat computers the way they ought to work! Needing to restart shit, with any regularity, is a flaw. Some of us are doing work, god dammit, and having to get things set up from scratch is a pain in the ass.
All the stuff I have open is open for a reason. The fact it all gradually stops working is not excused by the fact it can be unfucked by a hard reset. It’s supposed to keep working.
Why is that unusual? The only time I close apps is when I restart for an update like once or twice a month.
And your computer is running THE WHOLE TIME?
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.
Check the RAM usage of each tab. My Firefox is constantly open at work, albeit with anywhere from 1-10 tabs, and it never gets slow. Only time I restart it is when Firefox updates.
