6 ms·

>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 bookmar

by r721 2y 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?

alecsm 2y ago
The tabs are open but not loaded so yeah, it's like a bookmark. Once you click the tab it loads the content.
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  I thought you needed an extension to unload tabs?
  - webstrand 2y ago
    Just quit firefox and restore tabs on restart, all of the tabs are now unloaded but still present in the tab bar.
  - gpvos 2y ago
    about:processes can kill processes, which will unload their tabs.
ranger_danger 2y ago
My 100+ tabs consuming 12GB of RAM says otherwise...
- ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
  I upgraded from 16gb to 32gb of RAM expressly because of firefox.
  - neglesaks 2y ago
    And the saying used to be that Chrome was the chief RAM gobbler of most users' PCs. :)
    - kimixa 2y ago
      A fully rendered modern webpage is BIG - no matter what engine rendered it. IIRC both current big engines drop the rendered state in the background under memory pressure, as it's pretty much the only way of dealing with it.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      Chrome is actually pretty good at dehydrating and rehydrating tabs on demand these days, at least in my experience.
- lxgr 2y ago
  Same here. What are the chances of that Mozilla rep actually using Chrome (which actually does auto-unload tabs these days)?
- shock 2y 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 2y 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.
    - techjamie 2y ago
      There is also an unfair comparison made in the article. > A quick PCMag test shows that 10 Chrome tabs on a Windows 11 PC with 32GB of RAM and 2TB of NVMe SSD storage take up over 2,000MB, or 12.5% of PC memory, so there's still room for improvement (Hazel's massive Firefox session file is just 70MB). Taking up nearly 2GB of RAM for 10 tabs sucks, but they seem to be comparing the size of the session on disk to the resident size of the loaded browser in memory, of course the memory footprint is going to blow it away.
    - em-bee 2y ago
      well i have 4600 tabs, 13 windows, 18 tab groups and 130 firefox processes. htop shows me that while each browser process has about 3GB of virtual memory, all of them barely register any real memory use. so as far as i can tell, tabs do not use any memory.
      - ranger_danger 2y ago
        Ok but those tabs would have to be suspended for them to not use "any" memory.
        em-bee 2y ago
canadiantim 2y ago
Then why does my firefox freeze my comp if I have too many tabs open?
- gpvos 2y 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.
asadotzler 2y 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.

by r721 2y 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?

alecsm 2y ago

The tabs are open but not loaded so yeah, it's like a bookmark. Once you click the tab it loads the content.

ranger_danger 2y ago
I thought you needed an extension to unload tabs?
- webstrand 2y ago
  Just quit firefox and restore tabs on restart, all of the tabs are now unloaded but still present in the tab bar.
- gpvos 2y ago
  about:processes can kill processes, which will unload their tabs.

ranger_danger 2y ago

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

ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
I upgraded from 16gb to 32gb of RAM expressly because of firefox.
- neglesaks 2y ago
  And the saying used to be that Chrome was the chief RAM gobbler of most users' PCs. :)
  - kimixa 2y ago
    A fully rendered modern webpage is BIG - no matter what engine rendered it. IIRC both current big engines drop the rendered state in the background under memory pressure, as it's pretty much the only way of dealing with it.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Chrome is actually pretty good at dehydrating and rehydrating tabs on demand these days, at least in my experience.
lxgr 2y ago
Same here. What are the chances of that Mozilla rep actually using Chrome (which actually does auto-unload tabs these days)?
shock 2y 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 2y 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.
  - techjamie 2y ago
    There is also an unfair comparison made in the article. > A quick PCMag test shows that 10 Chrome tabs on a Windows 11 PC with 32GB of RAM and 2TB of NVMe SSD storage take up over 2,000MB, or 12.5% of PC memory, so there's still room for improvement (Hazel's massive Firefox session file is just 70MB). Taking up nearly 2GB of RAM for 10 tabs sucks, but they seem to be comparing the size of the session on disk to the resident size of the loaded browser in memory, of course the memory footprint is going to blow it away.
  - em-bee 2y ago
    well i have 4600 tabs, 13 windows, 18 tab groups and 130 firefox processes. htop shows me that while each browser process has about 3GB of virtual memory, all of them barely register any real memory use. so as far as i can tell, tabs do not use any memory.
    - ranger_danger 2y ago
      Ok but those tabs would have to be suspended for them to not use "any" memory.
      - em-bee 2y ago

canadiantim 2y ago

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

gpvos 2y 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.

asadotzler 2y 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.