Why does firefox use so much memory?

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Caporegime
Joined
12 Mar 2004
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Firefox version 3.66 with 10 tabs open.
 
Depends what you have in the tabs :/

I've had up to 1.6GB memory usage when I was testing how big a memory hog a certain flash game was. Did the same in IE.
 
That's not too bad. Opera with 41 tabs open is at 1.16GB, so roughly 4x tabs, slightly under 3x memory. Opera's slightly more efficient with it atm compared to Firefox I think.

Also only have 1 Flash game (Scrabble) which is in a 'absent mode' status. No Flash adverts either thanks to KIS.
 
I do agree that browsers have a far larger memory footprint than they perhaps should do, but in this day and age why not? 430MB is nothing compared to the the amount of ram that is shipped in new builds these days as standard. It makes sense to use the abundant fast memory store than swapping to the slow disk store.
 
BunnyKillBot said:
I do agree that browsers have a far larger memory footprint than they perhaps should do, but in this day and age why not? 430MB is nothing compared to the the amount of ram that is shipped in new builds these days as standard. It makes sense to use the abundant fast memory store than swapping to the slow disk store.
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Well it slows down application loading times as the browsers data has to be swapped when the memory is needed by something else.
 
Firefox 'saves' the tabs that you have had open, and their history, close some tabs, then press..


ctrl + shift + t and it will re open any dead tabs, personally, I'd rather have it used up than sitting there doing nothing
 
You've also got to remember that the memory in use would also include the cache.

I'm currently running 3 tabs and my memory usage is around 90MB
 
SubFocus said:
Firefox is known for memory leaks.
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In the same sense that Windows is known for being insecure (i.e. someone arrived at a shaky conclusion years ago and it's been thrown about ever since).
Any even remotely half-arsed examination shows Firefox does a pretty decent job of releasing memory once it's not needed any more. Other than that, most of the other points have already been covered - it depends on extensions, what you're doing, some of it is cache, images, blah blah blah.

about:memory might give some clues about what's going on too.
 
platypus said:
It is bad though GreenLizard. I open Firefox and get ~250MB memory usage with my default about:blank page loaded!
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The problem's at your end then. You've probably got ****loads of bloated addons and extensions installed(?).

Firefox only takes 32MB for me with 1 tab showing google.co.uk and the following extensions:


 
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