If like me, you’ve noticed Firefox eating all of your memory, I hope this article, sharing my troubleshooting journey, will help you to get better insight into why it is using so much.
I started by closing tabs, removing extensions and in fact doing this took my memory from 4.8GB to 6.2GB, and then restarting Firefox seemed to bring it back down to 3.9GB, which for just having 20 tabs open and running just three extensions, still seems wrong.
To dig into this deeper, I hopened a new tab in firefox and visited: about:memory
Then I clicked ‘Measure’ in the ‘Show memory reports’ section:
From the list on the right, I clicked each one to see what the memory associated with them was:
The one highlighted above is for OWA (Outlook Web App), which to my mind is using too much, but not much I can do about that, although I will look to see if I can turn off some of the auto refresh features etc in OWA.
That seems to be the worst I can see, but interestingly, the numbers in here, do not tally up with what I can see in task manager.
For me, the fix, well part fix, was realising which tabs used the most, closing them, opening the same links in new tabs and restarting Firefox. It hasn’t solved it though, it’s just made it a little better.
If another browser had the ability to run tabs as containers, I’d switch tomorrow, as Firefox’s memory hogging is becoming a real problem, just like it is/was in Chrome.
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