With the evolution and growth of Chrome and the Edge update, Firefox has lost and continues to lose ground. The three things that are most criticized on Firefox are:
1) the lack of real innovation.
2) The fact that Firefox always seems to take up more memory than it actually consumes causing, if you open many tabs together, slowdowns especially on older and less powerful computers.
3) The limit of the extensions much smaller than in the past.
Although Firefox consumes less memory than previous versions and even if later versions, which you can try with Firefox Aurora and Nightly, will have a marked improvement, the fact remains that Firefox occupies and consumes a lot of RAM and computer resources .
Its memory usage doesn't seem efficient and turns the computer into a snail.
The RAM memory problem is felt by those who have used Firefox for the longest time and have stored many bookmarks in bookmarks and those who, over the years, have installed many extensions and add-ons or add-ons.
Firefox has therefore become a program, not at all light, which when it starts consumes a large part of the computer's memory .
When you leave Firefox open for a certain period of time, with multiple tabs open on different sites, the computer slowly slows down because the memory taken by Firefox occupies the available one.
The so-called ' memory loss ' has always been a problem with Firefox and Mozilla also recognizes the existence of this high memory consumption and as a solution recommends periodically restarting Firefox.
The high amount of memory that Firefox uses and consumes is related to the amount of tabs open simultaneously.
The easiest way to save RAM is to close the tabs and not open too many at the same time .
Since the number of cards that causes a computer slowdown varies from pc to pc depending on the hardware power, there are some extensions that help manage memory and open tabs .
1) Unload Tab allows you to suspend open but not active tabs in Firefox so as to decrease the impact of the program on the CPU and memory and improve the browser response speed.
2) OneTab to free up memory occupied by cards
3) Unloader tab
This extension allows you to download and then free RAM memory from inactive cards .
In this way the consumption of RAM decreases and Firefox, overall, reduces its memory and CPU usage and does not slow down the computer's performance.
Open tabs are not closed with BarTab.
You can free up memory automatically, setting in the options that after 10 minutes that a card is not seen and remains in the background, it must be unloaded from memory.
the memory unload of a card can also be done manually.
4) TabGroups Manager (no longer exists)
This extension is used to better manage open tabs and group them into groups so as to hibernate them and remove them from RAM memory.
I want to clarify that when a card is removed from memory, it remains in the background so as not to lose sight of it but, if you want to reopen it, you have to reload it from scratch.
TabGroups works similarly to BarTab only that grouping and releasing RAM is manual.
5) Memory Restart (disappeared) shows the use of Firefox memory in the toolbar and, when the consumption is too high (and exceeds a value decided by the user), the Memory restart button turns red to signal that Firefox is to slow down your computer because it consumes, for example, 90% of available RAM memory.
You can then save the open tabs and restart Firefox to recover all the memory Firefox has eaten .
Alternatively, you can configure Restart Firefox to restart the browser automatically when the memory limit is exceeded .
The addon saves the browsing session so the same sites and web pages that you were visiting are immediately reopened.
Obviously then to make sure that Firefox does not slow down the computer while surfing the internet there are other measures described in other articles including:
- Things to do if Firefox is slower than other browsers.
- Speed up the loading of Firefox.
- Optimize Firefox with all internal parameter changes.
Alternatively, if you are not satisfied, you can use PaleMoon, a faster and lighter Firefox version .
