Firefox Becomes the New Chrome As Users Complain of Huge Memory Usage

CyberTech

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Mozilla Firefox has long been considered the main alternative to Google Chrome, with many praising its low resource usage, but it looks like everything has changed in the latest update for the browser.

The new Firefox has become quite a memory hog, users now complain, with a thread on reddit indicating that Mozilla’s browser eats up much more RAM than Google Chrome.

While this is something that nobody would have imagined a couple of years ago, users complain that Firefox can sometimes even crash systems with a limited amount of RAM due to this increased resource usage.
 

spaceoctopus

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Lol...guys, Firefox for a very long time has been a resource hog, a real dinosaur. Great features, lots of flexibility but greedy on resources. The only relic of Firefox...giving you a taste of the good old days, is Palemoon. Crisp and fast, and a basic, oldschool design👍
 

South Park

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I've always found the Chromium browsers -- even 64-bit -- use much less memory on my low-end laptops than Firefox Quantum. On my cheap Android tablet, I've had to replace Firefox with the ultra-light Chromium -based Kiwi Browser.

I would use Chromium as my main desktop browser except for its limited customization compared to Firefox and its very poor bookmark and download management. I also would need to find a way to make it truly portable between laptops without using Google sync.
 

SeriousHoax

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This is not true always. It's not a memory hog in my experience. Currently 23 tabs open with 11 extensions active. Ram usage is fine. Only 1.5 gb in this case 👌
firefire.png

Anyway, anyone with 8gb ram shouldn't even bother with ram usage unless there's any memory leak. Unused ram is useless.
 
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Handsome Recluse

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Unused ram is useless.
Unused RAM is allowance for volatility esp. for us 4GB peeps. I don't like my computer to be cucked by a browser.

Lol...guys, Firefox for a very long time has been a resource hog, a real dinosaur. Great features, lots of flexibility but greedy on resources. The only relic of Firefox...giving you a taste of the good old days, is Palemoon. Crisp and fast, and a basic, oldschool design👍
SeaMonkey is the only true old Firefox.
 
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bayasdev

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Actually the real memory hog in a modern browser is the GPU process IDK why they don't schedule a garbage collection every time you close a tab, the only browser that manages this in a more efficient way is the new Edge. You can reproduce this after a long browsing session and close all tabs, memory usage won't go down as it was when you launched it.

PD: IMHO Firefox is the best Windows browser (super smooth scrolling and animations) but the worst on Android (website incompatibilities, background tabs getting discarded after switching to other app, weird rendering artifacts, slow CSS animations, etc).
 

South Park

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Unused RAM is allowance for volatility esp. for us 4GB peeps. I don't like my computer to be cucked by a browser.
That's the problem with my laptop, only 4 GB of RAM with shared graphics and not easily expandable. My previous laptop, which only had 3 GB of RAM, would become unresponsive within minutes of starting Firefox 64-bit, so I had to run the 32-bit version and limit the # of processes.

Officially Mozilla claims FF 64-bit can run on 2 GB of RAM and a Pentium 4 (!), but I get the impression they don't really test on old hardware. I never had the memory problems with Chromium that other people have reported on either laptop; perhaps Chromium works better with integrated graphics?
 

Vitali Ortzi

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That's the problem with my laptop, only 4 GB of RAM with shared graphics and not easily expandable. My previous laptop, which only had 3 GB of RAM, would become unresponsive within minutes of starting Firefox 64-bit, so I had to run the 32-bit version and limit the # of processes.

Officially Mozilla claims FF 64-bit can run on 2 GB of RAM and a Pentium 4 (!), but I get the impression they don't really test on old hardware. I never had the memory problems with Chromium that other people have reported on either laptop; perhaps Chromium works better with integrated graphics?
On default settings chrome is superior in performance to firefox you need to change many flags on low end hardware to get it really silky smooth
 

Stopspying

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This is not true always. It's not a memory hog in my experience. Currently 23 tabs open with 11 extensions active. Ram usage is fine. Only 1.5 gb in this case 👌
View attachment 237829
Anyway, anyone with 8gb ram shouldn't even bother with ram usage unless there's any memory leak. Unused ram is useless.
I'm with you on this, FF isn't hogging memory on my main PC (8Gb) or an older one with 4Gb. The attached screenshot
Task Manager - Firefox -21.04.20.png
is of the 4Gb memory PC just now.

Editing to highlight the difference in formatting of this thread after I saved my comment, compared to how the screenshot showed I'd laid out the text and screenshot.
 

South Park

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On default settings chrome is superior in performance to firefox you need to change many flags on low end hardware to get it really silky smooth
I've found FF 75 to be rather unpleasant, so I'm giving Ungoogled Chromium another try. Although the measured RAM usage is about the same, Chromium (with mostly the same extensions) seems to load pages faster and to be more responsive.
 

F 4 E

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Jan 27, 2019
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I use Pale Moon. Firefox has been a memory hog for a long time.

Lol...guys, Firefox for a very long time has been a resource hog, a real dinosaur. Great features, lots of flexibility but greedy on resources. The only relic of Firefox...giving you a taste of the good old days, is Palemoon. Crisp and fast, and a basic, oldschool design👍

Couldn't agree more. I've dumped both Chrome and Firefox for these reasons
 
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