Comment by ASalazarMX
17 hours ago
I'm ashamed to daily run Ubuntu at home with Chrome (a dozen tabs), Firefox (literally hundreds of tabs, but only a few active), Thunderbird, RSSGuard, whatever I'm currently working with, and sometimes Steam and a AAA game on top of that. Never felt the need to close anything, but I must confess I have 64 Gb of RAM.
At work I ran the same Firefox profile in Windows, with 16 GB of RAM, it used to eat RAM more eagerly, and restarting only helped for a few hours. I never understood why, but GMail and WhatsApp tabs were usually the biggest memory drains.
I'm just happy I don't have to deal with that anymore, since we were moved to iMacs at work, and the same Firefox profile gives no trouble with 24 Gb or RAM. WhatsApp is still the hungriest tab, but it stabilizes. Maybe there's a sweet spot between which tabs are opened and how much RAM do you have?
Macs will compress infrequently-used memory, and of course everything will swap. So you can have tons of idle tabs that aren't using physical RAM.
That’s not the case with Firefox.
I’ve found a few idle YouTube tabs is enough to bring macOS to its knees. Though I do wonder if uBlock Origin is the hidden cause rather than Firefox itself.
YouTube is absolutely atrocious. And it never stops trying to load AD content, even if the user is Premium. So uBlock Origin can sit at 1500 blocked requests in less than an hour.