This is becoming a very annoying issues anymore. When I have like anything over 10 tabs open FF makes windows go crazy and it locks up my entire PC.
Check about:performance to see what is using so much RAM. Keep in mind that this is just your tabs and not firefox overall. If something looks fishy in there, you have your culprit. This won't tell you about ghost windows or any weird leaks. about:processes will give you a more detailed but still okay to look at picture.
How much memory is it using exactly? I would say up to 2 gb is normal. Anything above that is probably abnormal unless you're on some intense sites.
A more technical method would be to measure memory usage at about:memory.
Does anyone have a list of all the Firefox
about:? The ones I know areabout:config,about:memory, andabout:support.
What extensions do you have installed? You can see the full list (including the built-in search engines) by going to about:support and ctrl-f "add-ons"
It's likely that one of those is a culprit. I also saw you said ublock, but like sexywheat said make sure it's "uBlock Origin" -- the original "uBlock" name tl;dr got misappropriated by some asshole and was effectively stolen and made into stupid bullshit.
TROUBLESHOOTING STEP: You may also want to try a clean profile as a test. Profiles in Firefox are basically all the data a browser uses for your session, including cookies, cache, history, add-ons, logins, and everything else that might be user-related. This way you don't affect anything you currently have, and all your testing will be in a clean profile.
Starting with Firefox closed, I think in Windows you can just push Win+R (Run dialog box) and type
firefox.exe -pto launch the profile thing. Click "Create Profile" and give it a name like "SorosFootSoldierPro" or whatever. Install uBlock Origin and use it as you would normally. If you are not encountering any problems that likely means you installed some other extension or something else that is causing problems.These are the addons I have:
Add-ons Search Detection extension 2.0.0 true addons-search-detection@mozilla.com
Amazon.com extension 1.3 true amazondotcom@search.mozilla.org
Bing extension 1.3 true bing@search.mozilla.org
DuckDuckGo extension 1.1 true ddg@search.mozilla.org
eBay extension 1.3 true ebay@search.mozilla.org
Google extension 1.2 true google@search.mozilla.org
Nitter Redirect extension 1.1.5 true {513646f8-fb87-4135-a41e-4cf1d1ccccf2}
NoScript extension 11.4.13 true {73a6fe31-595d-460b-a920-fcc0f8843232}
Search by Image extension 5.4.2 true {2e5ff8c8-32fe-46d0-9fc8-6b8986621f3c}
uBlock Origin extension 1.45.2 true uBlock0@raymondhill.net
User-Agent Switcher and Manager extension 0.4.8 true {a6c4a591-f1b2-4f03-b3ff-767e5bedf4e7}
Wikipedia (en) extension 1.1 true wikipedia@search.mozilla.org
Honestly none of those stand out to me. You may want to try the profile thing I suggested for good measure. If it's still shitty after that then I really dunno what to say.
Final idea:
Go to
about:supportagain and click the button near the top to "Refresh Firefox." Usually you get that prompt if it's been a long time since you've opened Firefox. What it actually does is create a new profile for you behind the scenes and migrate all your data to it. It could somehow fix something along the way. It's a bit less obnoxious than creating a new profile since your history will be carried along, but I guess it's possible the thing that is causing a problem might also be "refreshed" into the new profile.
You are still using an hdd in 2022?
It's like $50, holds 2 TB of data, and runs fast. What else would I need?
Hybrid HDDs are not that good https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/tperq8/what_happened_to_sshds_or_hybrid_drives_were_they/
You can get a 1 TB SSD for $50 and have fast speeds all of the time. Do you really need 2TB?
Likely what is happening is it uses all your RAM, which then overflows onto your super slow storage. You could potentially prolong the life of your current laptop by putting an SSD in. I don't know if other browsers will use RAM in a better way
if its the original hard drive, then your hard drive is probably the real bottle neck. upgrade to an ssd and the computer will be usable for years.
I have a somewhat pricey gaming laptop with 16GB and Firefox will frequently eat up nearly half of it. It also will light up my CPU to the point where my fans kick on like I'm playing cyberpunk 2077 on ultra ray-tracing. I'm about ready to ditch it, also.
theyre fine for storage, but if youre running an operating system the OS should be on an SSD or youre gonna have a bad time. HDDs were a bottleneck for a long time. I just got rid of a computer made in 2013 that was still usable thanks to the SSD.
it's not that bad if the OS can cache properly, RAM pressure and bootups are only slow for me on an old hdd
thats the wisdom id heard and i am running my os offa SSD i was just curious if there was new reasons to dislike the old ways/bigger improvements in ssds
That doesn't sound like normal behaviour from Firefox. Check your addons/extensions to see if there's anything fucky in there. If you can't identify any obvious ones that look out of place try disabling them all and see if that fixes. If so, re-enable them one by one until yo find your culprit.
i have 2348 tabs open on my 8gb ram mac as well as uBlock Origin and it's running fine, I wouldn't bet on it.
If you check task manager, what is the name of the processes hogging the most RAM? if it's FirefoxCP WebExtensions it may be your extensions.
i have 2348 tabs open
Whoa, I had no idea my mom was a Hexbear user. This is really cool, but also a total surprise. Does Dad know?
maybe try going to about:memory (link) and clicking minimize memory usage? that works usually it just lags for like a min while it clears the usage up a bit and then its good
If the problem persists after reinstalling ublock then you can try resetting firefox to default settings:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-preferences-fix-problems
Unlikely, I've never had a problem with ublock but you could try removing it and reinstalling, make sure it's ublock origin from the official source
Did you search r/Firefox and related subs? There must be a zillion thread about it. It's been a problem for a very loooooooong time. About a decade?
What I would do is search a lot. And if I didn't get the answers I wanted - I post in at least 3 subs because of the asshole problem where at least one thread dies because of an insta-downvote.
Honestly I'm ready to ditch firefox for opera at this point.
Brave is pretty good. Google's rendering engine (like basically everybody else), built-in ad and tracker and cookie consent widget blocking
