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Comment by r721

2 years ago

>A Mozilla rep confirms to PCMag that having tons of Firefox tabs open consumes "practically no memory whatsoever."

So they are not that different from bookmarks then?

20 comments

r721

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asadotzler  2 years ago

They consume more than bookmarks because they have the current page content and context and the navigation history. Firefox does a good job minimizing the memory this takes, but it's non-zero. For that reason I rarely go above about 400 tabs in a session. My wife, on the other hand, is OK with swap to a fast SSD that I'm not OK with and has several thousand tabs loaded at any given time.

ranger_danger  2 years ago

My 100+ tabs consuming 12GB of RAM says otherwise...

  • shock  2 years ago

    That's because of the Javascript running on them. If I have a dozen youtube tabs that are not suspended my FF becomes very janky and if I look in FF task manager, sure enough, they're consuming lots of CPU. I suspend them and FF becomes snappier again.

    • ranger_danger  2 years ago

      > suspend

      Right, but the article says nothing about suspending and seems to strongly suggest that tabs take "no ram at all" by default, which is just plain false, unless I'm misunderstanding something. I don't even see a way to suspend tabs without a separate extension.

      5 replies →

  • lxgr  2 years ago

    Same here. What are the chances of that Mozilla rep actually using Chrome (which actually does auto-unload tabs these days)?

canadiantim  2 years ago

Then why does my firefox freeze my comp if I have too many tabs open?

  • gpvos  2 years ago

    You can have thousands of unloaded tabs, but loaded tabs can gobble up memory and your computer may start swapping. It will usually recover from that but it can take a minute or two. If you get that often, you can open about:processes , sort on memory use and kill a few of the largest processes, which will unload their tabs.