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.
You can see the worst offenders in firefox by using the hamburger menu then more tools and Task manager. You can sort by ram. YouTube likes to hold gigs of ram for some videos. Close the biggest offenders and you’ll get back close to normal speed.
Ding ding ding, the only good reply in this thread.
The symptoms described by OP smell like good old memory exhaustion.
just close it
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.
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.
You should try that nightly build for troubleshooting purposes
Also, because it forces you to restart the browser every night.
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 🤷
I’ve had this for years, I just exit and restart.
I had the same problem recently. Especially the youtube UI became very unresponsive and would take several seconds to respond. I have 96G ram…
I downloaded ESR instead. So far so good.
This thread is full of maniacs. Anyone who keeps more than like 10 tabs needs to do some sand art or some shit. You gotta let some things go man.
I don’t believe any of them. Sounds like they just want to feign outrage to seem interesting.
I don’t hold anything against you, OP, but… 30 tabs open for two weeks makes me feel yucky on the inside.
Hahajahajaha
I have like 90?
Sorry, eh. (Yea, I know I shouldn’t, but I’m lazy)
I have multiple Firefox windows with around 1-1.5k tabs on each, and they have been opened (and re opened) since about a year.
I ❤️ tabs, they make me feel all warm on the insideLol I open them to look at later, and I also open lots songs on youtube to listen to and switch between songs rather than reopen the songs over and over I just keep it open.
Oh, the 20 tabs thing is perfectly reasonable. But I’m one of those crazy people who completely shuts down his computer every night, including closing my browser. Been using computers for too many years to trust a browser to not leak memory.
You can bookmark webpages to come back to later and even organize them in trees by category. You can ceeate a playlist of songs from youtube and import it to a service with no ads like piped, then shuffle it. If you’re willing to put up with 30+ open tabs these are much less time consuming than scrolling through the default way it situates tabs, AND there aren’t 30 open tabs sucking your resources.
If you already knew all this, I’m almost sorry.
I’m almost sorry
Hahahahaha oh boy the comments here today are great!
(I’m one of those who never reboots, never closes Firefox).
Personally, if I bookmark something, the odds of ever getting back to it are very, very low, and so are the odds of deleting obsolete bookmarks of unread news etc. But the songs tips are great, I’ll have to look into it, thank you!
And 30 tabs is very tame.
Yeah, I get twitchy when I have more than about ten tabs open. My senior regularly has thousands, across multiple browser windows. There are two types of people.
This is some S tier trolling.
What?
Listen, not even Dexter is the kind of person to leave thirty tabs open for two weeks. You would have to be some kind of insane serial killer to do stuff like that.
Lol, guess I’m an insane serial killer then!
Come on 30 tabs is nothing, read the bug report. The guy in the bug report open about a 1000 in totals, I don’t even know how to keep up with that many tabs.
I currently have a bit over 2400 tabs open, and it has been roughly a month since I restarted firefox for being too laggy. It is becoming an issue again.
Seek help…
No one can help him. We tried. He has more Firefox tabs than days left on earth. It’s horrible, and I’m looking forward to visiting him one day and resetting everything.
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.
Why would you need your browser, let alone your PC on for weeks without any break
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.
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.
Because I’m doing stuff.
FaaS: Firefox as a Service
Why would I say goodbye to a good friend?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Only the part with youtube. Don’t know if they are pulling some tricks on uBlock users, but about 10 tabs of youtube can get nasty, even with a somewhat recent workstation.
