God I wish chrome didn’t remove manifest v2 
Here is the list of things that piss me off about firefox:
- It is dogshit slow
- It eats up a ludicrous amounts of RAM, which I wasn’t expecting since it’s one of the main things people make fun of chrome for
- It crashes constantly
- It tries to push it’s “AI” bullshit on me despite me turning it off on multiple occasions
- It puts ads on my home page
- It needs to be relaunched regularly because at some point it becomes too laggy to use. It even stops loading pages altogether
- “Restore previous session” feature doesn’t work half the time so restarting the browser is absolutely terrifying
- Profile management is a mess
Are there any alternatives? Is Brave any good?
The RAM thing (and it getting slow over time) is due to the default way it handles inactive tabs. Mozilla decided that users would probably prefer to have tabs be fast when switching between them, so they are kept “active” in RAM for basically ever. This was not the case back when RAM was considered a scarce resource.
I installed an extension to automatically unload tabs after a certain period of inactivity and RAM usage is no longer a problem. As of the most recent update you can also unload tabs manually natively.
As for the ads, AI, etc, all of that can be turned off, and generally only has to be turned off once. Though you may want to look into a fork that does this for you, like LibreWolf.
Which addon is this? Search engines are unfortunately useless these days, and I just got a thousand auto generated articles about how Firefox has an unload tabs context menu button now.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/
highly recommend you install this @kleeon@hexbear.net . Its a huge memory saver.
What OS are you on and what other addons are you using? Something definitely odd seems to be going on with your install.
Thank you. This is a nice QoL improvement.
And it seems people are working overtime to make it scarce again. Firefox alone is taking a whopping 10 gigs - a third of my RAM. And between VS Code and a few things running inside of WSL, I now feel like I have to upgrade to 64 gigs
Christ, I’m typing this on Firefox and it’s only using 2.5gb of ram. And I have 16 tabs! An excessive amount of tabs! What do you have open???
some of us like to use tabs like bookmarks and never close them ever
Same but I also never revisit them
40 hexbear tabs open because every time I want to go back to it I just open a new tab rather than go back to the one I was using before (that would take ~5 seconds more and I no longer have that kinda attention span!)
With the number of tabs I have open 16 is effectively indistinguishable from 0
I have almost 100 tabs open. Most of them are just text - github pages, google search results, news articles, documentation pages. And a couple of youtube videos
Granted, it is a lot of tabs but I don’t get why rendering some text to the screen should take so much memory
aren’t really “just text” unless you’ve done something funky to google and are only browsing cool news sites
2.5 gigs is still a shitload, no?
I’m watching 3 different video essays on 3 tabs, and a 4th video on a Baldur’s Gate 3 challenge run. Just watching like 10 mins of each and rotating. Idk why I do this.
Also a few Hexbear and wiki pages open, and for some reason tvtropes
What are you running in firefox? My firefox currently has 11 tabs open and is only at 1.4gb ram use.
The biggest consumer of my ram right now is discord at 3gb.
It is down to 7 gigs now. According to firefox task manager - 1 gig for “GPU” process, another gig for “Firefox” process and the rest are mostly google pages - each seems to use around 100 megs on average
When people say “unused RAM is wasted RAM” I want to kick something
Yeah, they seem to forget that there are other processes that also need to run on this computer. Resources are finite
10 gigs?!?! wtf? That sounds like a bug! I have 16GB RAM + 5GB swap on my “beefy” machine. Use it for all the regular stuff (web browsing, basic productivity) plus compiling software, gaming, running VMs, that is more memory hungry. Other than running win 11 VMs I notice zero performance issues. My laptop has 8GB RAM and I can browse the web without issue on there (Librewolf), only struggles with running VMs and Jetbrains IDEs.
I’d report the memory usage to Mozilla. That doesn’t sound right unless you’re doing some crazy javascript stuff?