I opened Firefox with no add-ons except Ad-Blocker

[Orrex]

And it immediately blew up to 330megs. This happens all the time. WTF?

It's not like I'm sequencing DNA or piloting a fleet of robot assassins.

Why does Firefox demand so much memory to open to a blank tab?

[teach1st]

1. How much memory do you have?

I have 24 GB and Firefox with five plugins (including Ad-Blocker) opens a blank tab at about 260 MB.

[Orrex]

2. I'm running on a much older system

It's an inherited Acer laptop with a pitiable 1 gig of RAM.

But whether I have on 1gb or 1tb of memory, why does Firefox take 300MB to do nothing?

[teach1st]

4. I don't know why Firefox is using so much memory

In my experience, the less memory installed, the less a browser uses.

You might want to run through some of these routines to see what's going on:

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2015/04/mozilla-firefox-how-to-diagnose-excessive-ram-usage/

[Orrex]

5. Thanks--I'll give that a look when I get home

[woodsprite]

3. I see the same thing,

But have a few more plug-ins. It doesn't take any time for it to get to 800K, then it starts really getting slow. This is my work computer, almost 3 yrs old, plenty of RAM and a 750GB hard drive. Also tons of security software running (mcafee, kace, and something else) so it doesn't seem to be a virus or malware related issue.

[MowCowWhoHow III]

6. I like most things about Firefox, but the memory management sucks donkey balls

I've just had to restart the latest 64-bit build, as it freezing every few minutes and hoarding 6.5 GB for some reason.

[UTUSN]

7. For years my Dem/Left/Libs here told me to go Firefox (& I've been on it for a year)

The previous 15 years of my non-tech internet experience has been with IE, and *NEVER* had problems.

Am not having probs now, but in the past year have had more than in 15 years with IE.

Light Googling has told me that Firefox does, indeed, use much more memory that other things. I'm a MINIMAL user of everything, just here at DU and daily news sites and e-mail.

Anyway, am creature-of-habit & don't like Change, so am still here. DUers always have answers, so ...

[hunter]

8. Try Dillo... Firefox is greedy and grabs all the memory it can.

And it's not polite about giving memory up to cache should other applications call for it.

Okay, I'm just kidding about Dillo, sort of... I miss the days when web pages were simple and designed for dial-up connections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dillo

Dillo doesn't include Javascript so most modern websites don't look good on it, if they work at all.

Opera Mini is another lightweight browser, and it's extremely popular in Africa and other places with poor internet connectivity. Web page requests are sent on to Opera's servers which then fetch the full web page and digest it down into something much smaller, which is then sent back to the requesting device. This of course makes Opera another "man in the middle" but they promise not to divulge your browsing habits.

http://www.opera.com/mobile

I always run any web pages I create through Dillo. If they work well there, it's more likely they'll work for people who rely on assistive technologies to browse the web, tools such as extremely enlarged text, text-to-voice, or very specialized pointer technologies like eye trackers or puff-and-sip straws.

My regular browser these days is a slightly modified version of Chrome. It's locked down so hard some web sites don't work, (no third party cookies, no flash, etc.,) but so long as DU and a few other sites I visit regularly are working, that's exactly how I like it. I also set it to clear out all the cookies and other cruft every time I exit the browser. The few passwords I need to log back onto my usual sites I keep in my head.

[Orrex]

9. I'll check on Opera

I thought about Chrome, but Google told me that my system wouldn't support it, so phooey.


Thanks for the tip!

[MicaelS]

10. Have you cleared browser history and cookies?

Or would that be too inconvenient? If not try CCleaner. It will remove a lot of crud from your system. It's free and can save a lot of space on your hard drive.

It has a tab that lets you clean individual browsers, and even what you want to remove from said browsers.

But, Firefox has always been a memory hog.

[Orrex]

11. I'll try out CCleaner

I actually have Firefox set to clear history & cookies @ closing because I read a few years ago that it boosts performance. I shudder to think how slowly it would run with a huge clog of history!

[MicaelS]

12. Forgot to tell you...

Be very careful with CCleaner. It is very powerful.

My Firefox was so slow one time, I could not figure out why. I found I had a full Gigabyte of history. I deleted that and that fixed things.