Mozilla Firefox suddenly resource hog

I guess more people than me uses Mozilla. For me, this began last week or so. I am thinking of switching to opera - does it have an equivalent of ublock? My laptop is +7 years old and ads slows it down. Or should I reinstall Mozilla - will it keep my precious ublock settings?

What happens is that the work memory keeps increasing until mozilla freezes, so a restart is necessary every hour or so. As I am writing this it has increased to

1 573 433 in about 10 min or so.

I've also found it worse in this respect recently, following an update that I grudgingly allowed when it and some websites started to whine.

It has been better recently, though I can't remember what I did to make this happen. Maybe another update helped, or maybe I disabled some stuff that I didn't need. Or maybe I just changed my browsing habits (fewer tabs). Sorry that this isn't exactly helpful to you. But maybe this is:

about:cache?device=memory

Put that in the address bar and it will show you what is using memory. If there are specific features of websites you use that are being problematic, remember that you can use Adblock-plus (and the Element Hiding Helper) to block much more than ads. (I use it to block all images that contain "trump", but that's another matter...)

2 hours ago, NeedHealth said:

I guess more people than me uses Mozilla. For me, this began last week or so.

I've had similar issues about half a year ago, at which point I decided to simply install a new Mozilla version from scratch after clearing all leftovers from my registry, which solved the issue. As for your ad-blocks or whatever, I have no idea how that is going to work or not.

I remember thinking to myself years ago that Firefox was too much of a resource hog. Switched to Chrome and haven't looked back. 

@Grazza I switched to ublock since I read adblock were going to sell their whitelist. There was a drive on r3ddit a year ago to educate people about this, I remember.  I'll see what I can fiddle with in the cache - thanks!

@Nine Inch Heels Maybe I'll consider a reinstall eventually. I am just nonplused by this and would like to see if I can solve it without drastic measures. I'll wait until an new update comes out and if that won't solve this I'll probably switch to opera.

@Ajora I've used firefox since like... 8 years ? It has worked flawlessly until now.

I'll solve this in steps. - wait for an firefox update that won't work - switch to opera to consider it crap - switch to chrome, I'll see where I'll end up.

I used to use Firefox as well, but I had similar issue to your. I switched to Chrome too and never looked back either since then. It has its flaws also of course, but still great that everything from my Google account is linked to Chrome as well as my Android smartphone.

Yeah, Firefox has been quite horrible the last few months. I find myself opening Chrome more and more often whenever I want to visit a site that's more than just text with pictures. But I think maybe turning off hardware acceleration in the settings helped somewhat if I'm not imagining it.

I was with Firefox for so many years, but I finally just stopped using it and switched to chrome. The mobile firefox is somehow better lol.

Also people still using firefox said they had to use it in like dev mode or something for it to not be such a resource hog? so yeah I'm not gonna mess with it lol I don't have time for that.

Firefox is like a girlfriend: fun to be with, but demands way too much out of your resources.

@Memfis I disallowed hard acceleration and it took a gigabyte off the working memory.

I stopped using Firefox years ago since switching over to Chrome, it used to be my favorite browser until version 4 something and then it started to run worse and worse for some reason.

I've recently caught it using up to 3 GB of RAM on my computer, and frequently capping out at 100% CPU usage on all four cores. It's just stupid at this point.

I have an addon installed that automatically unloads tabs that I haven't accessed in a while.  It doesn't close them, just unloads them from memory.  It's also pretty configurable in how long it waits to unload them, how it handles pinned tabs (I always have three: weather, Twitter, and some obscure forum called Doomworld), and the like.  I can also keep a tab loaded in memory regardless of how long it's been since I've used it, which is helpful if I have a youtube video I want playing in the background while I'm off somewhere else on the 'net.

I also have uBlock Origin and uMatrix installed, and while they help, I'm not using them for performance reasons.

In the end it uses about 200-400 MB of RAM and never goes above 5% CPU when it's just sitting in the background.

NINJA EDIT:  I also use a Bash script on Linux called Profile Cleaner that keeps my profile nice and tidy, though I'm not sure if something similar exists on Windows.

Seeing these types of threads makes me so glad I jumped ship from Firefox to Pale Moon years ago and never looked back. Got to keep all of my Firefox add-ons without having to deal with the train wreck Firefox has become. I even keep the portable version on a thumb drive so I can use it, along with some of my bookmarks, whenever I have to do something on someone else's PC.

People have told me Mozilla has been a resource hog for almost 10 years. They used to be the absolute emperor of resource efficiency. I know it's hard to imagine the wild west of the internet back in the early aughts (00s) 2006 and before.

I can not imagine life without firefox addons.

I've switched from Chrome to Firefox since version 54 where they added Electrolysis (the thing that makes Firefox multiprocess). Older versions of Firefox were slow, especially with videos and the amount of tabs that I open at the same time. Chrome ate all of my memory, I find that Firefox is less a memory hog than Chrome and web pages load faster. I'm only using two addons: uBlock Origin and Video DownloadHelper. I have removed Flash because it's a total cancer. I can't wait until Flash ceases to exist.

Firefox had a lot of catch up to do for the last three or four years. Back then, I had a lot of memory leaks, crashes and the browser was slow. Mozilla is rewriting their browser in Rust which will make it faster and more secure. I have a lot of confidence that using a better programming language will make the browser better.

"Suddenly" like it hasn't had a memory leak problem for years.

Disable hardware acceleration, install uBlock Origin. I've had no major problems with these two tweaks. In fact, having hardware acceleration on actually caused my computer to blue screen whilst watching an HD YouTube video.

Now what's interesting for me is that hardware acceleration decreased my memory usage by about 50MB.  I'm not sure how or why, but it seems to be a hit or miss (but mostly hit?) suggestion to turn it off.

Caveat: 64-bit Linux

22 hours ago, dethtoll said:

"Suddenly" like it hasn't had a memory leak problem for years.

Yeah, it was junk years ago. I used it when it was still decent at version 4, and when I switched again it was at version 13, and I think I only used it for like a year. Its currently at version 54 (!), either the devs don't understand software versioning, or they think it's some kind of score card.

8 minutes ago, Megalyth said:

Yeah, it was junk years ago. I used it when it was still decent at version 4, and when I switched again it was at version 13, and I think I only used it for like a year. Its currently at version 54 (!), either the devs don't understand software versioning, or they think it's some kind of score card.

More like they think it's a competition with Chrome to see who can have the biggest number after their name. Gotta cater to that crowd that's dumb enough to think the better browser has the bigger number.

10 minutes ago, Quasar said:

More like they think it's a competition with Chrome to see who can have the biggest number after their name. Gotta cater to that crowd that's dumb enough to think the better browser has the bigger number.

Exactly what I thought. There are very few minor revisions in the history, it's mostly major version jumps with no perceptible changes, and they come about very quickly. I haven't used FireFox since it became a pile of shit, but I'd wager it looks the same and has very few new or useful features.

It should be more like golf than basketball, but bigger must be better, heh. That kind of thing always brings to mind the "XBox -> XBox 360 -> XBox One" nonsense.

don't forget the Xbox One S and Xbox One X. that's not confusing in the slighest at all or anything.

Does Chrome have:

a) uBlock Origin addon?

b) about:config tweaks like Firefox?

c) ability to disable auto updates?

If yes to all three, I might switch to Chrome.

36 minutes ago, Nevander said:

Does Chrome have:

 

a) uBlock Origin addon?

b) about:config tweaks like Firefox?

c) ability to disable auto updates?

 

If yes to all three, I might switch to Chrome.

a) Yes.
b) Yes. (about:flags)
c) No, and due to the dynamic nature of internet security vulnerabilities and threats, arguably no web-browser should.

7 hours ago, Megalyth said:

Yeah, it was junk years ago. I used it when it was still decent at version 4, and when I switched again it was at version 13, and I think I only used it for like a year. Its currently at version 54 (!), either the devs don't understand software versioning, or they think it's some kind of score card.

6 hours ago, Megalyth said:

Exactly what I thought. There are very few minor revisions in the history, it's mostly major version jumps with no perceptible changes, and they come about very quickly.

Think you're reading too much into it to be honest. It's pretty clear that they just have a regular release process (every 1-2 months) and are using a simplified versioning scheme where it's just "Version 1", "Version 2", "Version 3", etc. rather than bothering with complicated version numbering schemes. There's a lot to be said for such a scheme to be honest, especially for a piece of software like a web browser where development is inevitably highly iterative in nature (the short release cycle makes a lot of sense for the same reason). It's rather telling that the Mozilla devs have also taken to a very similar scheme.

13 hours ago, Nevander said:

If yes to all three, I might switch to Chrome.

Don't give in to the beast with billion eyes! If anything, move to Pale Moon!

On 7/23/2017 at 4:55 AM, Nevander said:

 

c) ability to disable auto updates?

Google loves patching any way to disable it like it is some bug. You'll need some voodoo magic with Regedit and permission abuse to try and stop it, but don't think it is worth the effort at all. 

12 hours ago, fraggle said:

Think you're reading too much into it to be honest.

Yes, version numbers don't matter quite so much, but what did matter was the horrendous bloat. Maybe it's been improved since, but I like Chrome, so I see little reason to switch back.