2mo ago

Firefox becomes slow after a couple of weeks open

bugzilla.mozilla.org 1819286 - Firefox slows down abysmally after a week or so, having hundreds of tabs open (thousands of tabs in total)

NEW (davidp99) in Core - Widget: Win32. Last updated 2024-11-12.

Does anyone have this issue were firefox becomes slow if left open for a long time. In my case after a couple of weeks rendering becomes slow and when I use youtube for example if is laggy, just trying to change volume taka few second to show the volume bar. It also happens to my laptop at work. I have around 30 tabs open.

106 comments

Most software in general has hard to detect issues after several weeks of uptime. Its something that's fundamentally hard to test and fix. Its a big reason why "did you turn it off and on again" is such universal advice.
- People really out here treating their web browser like it's a mainframe
- Even if the software was perfect, virtually all desktop RAM isn't ECC equipped, so you potentially have even the hardware corrupting the state and requiring restarting because of that.

I don't hold anything against you, OP, but... 30 tabs open for two weeks makes me feel yucky on the inside.
- Lol I open them to look at later, and I also open lots songs on youtube to listen to and switch between songs rather than reopen the songs over and over I just keep it open.
  
  You can bookmark webpages to come back to later and even organize them in trees by category. You can ceeate a playlist of songs from youtube and import it to a service with no ads like piped, then shuffle it. If you're willing to put up with 30+ open tabs these are much less time consuming than scrolling through the default way it situates tabs, AND there aren't 30 open tabs sucking your resources.
  If you already knew all this, I'm almost sorry.
  
  Oh, the 20 tabs thing is perfectly reasonable. But I'm one of those crazy people who completely shuts down his computer every night, including closing my browser. Been using computers for too many years to trust a browser to not leak memory.
- Hahajahajaha
  I have like 90?
  Sorry, eh. (Yea, I know I shouldn't, but I'm lazy)
- I have multiple Firefox windows with around 1-1.5k tabs on each, and they have been opened (and re opened) since about a year.
  I ❤️ tabs, they make me feel all warm on the inside
- Yeah, I get twitchy when I have more than about ten tabs open. My senior regularly has thousands, across multiple browser windows. There are two types of people.

Are we all going to ignore this person had Firefox open for weeks?
- Why is that unusual? The only time I close apps is when I restart for an update like once or twice a month.
  
  And your computer is running THE WHOLE TIME?
- Yes.
  Stop trying to shame people for using their damn computer.
  
  Stop downvoting people who treat computers the way they ought to work! Needing to restart shit, with any regularity, is a flaw. Some of us are doing work, god dammit, and having to get things set up from scratch is a pain in the ass.
  All the stuff I have open is open for a reason. The fact it all gradually stops working is not excused by the fact it can be unfucked by a hard reset. It's supposed to keep working.
  
  Seems like a waste of electricity to me

I've had this for years, I just exit and restart.

You can see the worst offenders in firefox by using the hamburger menu then more tools and Task manager. You can sort by ram. YouTube likes to hold gigs of ram for some videos. Close the biggest offenders and you'll get back close to normal speed.
- Ding ding ding, the only good reply in this thread.
  The symptoms described by OP smell like good old memory exhaustion.
- In my experience this doesn't matter. Firefox just slows down if it's been open for long, regardless for how long the tab has been open for. Even if you unload all active tabs and open a new one, that new tab will still be significantly slower than it would be if you restarted the entire browser.
  It's some kind of slow resource leak somewhere.

Yes it happens. As others have said: just restart.
What might not be as clear: when you restart, if it doesn't just come up and offer to restore your session, you can go to History and Restore Previous Session. This reopens all your tabs (actually, they won't fully reload until you view them).
- Or just use bookmarks like a normal person
  
  Bookmarks are for really important stuff. Open tabs are for stuff I want to be able to easily stumble back upon, but I won't be butthurt if I dont.
  There's nothing wrong with having more than one way to categorize stuff.
  Edit: and considering that session data is also written to disk, there really isn't much difference between bookmarks and open tabs anyway.
  
  they have an entirely different use case

Why would you need your browser, let alone your PC on for weeks without any break
- My laptop with a non-critical service: Uptime: 9 weeks, 5 hours, 34 minutes
  
  I've had Debian VMs run for long periods of time without me touching them. They normally would have high uptime unless it automatically reboots to apply a kernel update. The key is these are virtualized servers. You should absolutely avoid running to long without a reboot. The longer you wait the greater the chance of something breaking on the next boot. There is also the issue of memory fragmentation but that's not really an issue these days.
- FaaS: Firefox as a Service
- Lol, cause we're all lazy gits.
  Cobbler's kids have the worst shoes. I'm the cobbler, and reboot when things start acting up.
- Because I'm doing stuff.
- Why would I say goodbye to a good friend?

just close it

Under about:unloads, you will see a list of open tabs, sorted by resource usage. You can click-spam the "Unload" button until that list is empty, or until the most resource-intensive tabs are off the list.
This does not require any third-party dependencies, and the tab will still be present on top. The site will reload once the tab is selected again.

What you're describing is called a resource leak. Something, an extension, a background process, etc., is holding onto resources for too long without cleaning itself up automatically.
This is pretty common in writing code, and extremely difficult to prevent except in closed and well understood systems. A browser is anything but that, due to the nature of needing to work on any website doing whatever they want.

Close everything and start fresh
Your productivity shouldn't rely on keeping one piece of software running for long periods of time.

If it's related to the thread you posted then try Nightly?
That's only in Nightly right now, unfortunately; it won't make it out to Release until v134.
Also, can I ask why you'd leave your browser open for weeks? Just curious of the use case. The thread mentions having 5700-7000 open tabs, and I can't fathom why someone would do that. It's not like the websites disappear if you close the tab. Nothing to do with the problem though, you don't have to answer.
- some people use tabs as bookmarks 🤷
- Also, can I ask why you’d leave your browser open for weeks?
  This just begs the question, Why do you not leave it open?
  
  To conserve resources / power? Like when I'm done using an app, I close it. When I'm done reading a website or using online banking, I close it. I don't leave my email, games or music open after I'm doing using them either. I actually turn off / sleep my entire device when I'm done using it, but that's not what my curiosity is about.
  
  Maybe because the software is designed to make that very practical and smooth. You also might point to hardware limitations, should you have a machine that doesn't have a lot of RAM, or perhaps you might point to simplicity, and that you don't want to have a cluttered taskbar.
  But it's kind of ironic that you would ask why not leave software open on a post where the problem was specifically mentioned as one that is solved by closing the software.
- I only have around 30 open and I don't turn off the laptop, after a while firefox becomes sluggish and I have to restart it.
  
  Have you tested with specific websites? Could it be a tab has some have JavaScript running constantly that’s causing the issue?
  
  You should try that nightly build for troubleshooting purposes

This thread is full of maniacs. Anyone who keeps more than like 10 tabs needs to do some sand art or some shit. You gotta let some things go man.
- I don't believe any of them. Sounds like they just want to feign outrage to seem interesting.
- As a therapy? To learn to let go of stuff?
  
  ye

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/
I've got more than 30 open tabs, though in practice I don't actually need ALL those tabs loaded. The extension unloads inactive tabs after a configurable time. You can also configure the extension so that pinned tabs are not unloaded, certain domains/URL patterns are not unloaded, etc.
- Firefox can automatically discard tabs when available memory gets too short. You need to configure it to do that though and probably disable the 10min minimum open time too if you're very short on memory.
- FFS, his leak is probably in an extension.
  Installing more extensions that might also leak is not a real solution, no matter what they do.
- That's a healthy solution

I had the same problem recently. Especially the youtube UI became very unresponsive and would take several seconds to respond. I have 96G ram...
I downloaded ESR instead. So far so good.

Only the part with youtube. Don't know if they are pulling some tricks on uBlock users, but about 10 tabs of youtube can get nasty, even with a somewhat recent workstation.

Try using a tab suspend extension, something like 'auto tab discard'. Firefox has one built-in, but it's not aggressive enough.

It's either you need more RAM or you must learn to use a tab group extension. Also, if it gets slow, just restart it.
Simple Tab Groups is a nice add-on.
My personal favourite is Sidebery. It has vertical tabs and easily navigatable via mouse wheel. You can even unload a tab. And has tons of customization options.

Check the RAM usage of each tab. My Firefox is constantly open at work, albeit with anywhere from 1-10 tabs, and it never gets slow. Only time I restart it is when Firefox updates.

Dawg I had like ~35 tabs open and hadn't restarted my PC in over three weeks. Fucking Firefox was sucking back 80 gigs of RAM. 80 fucking gigs.
On the bright side all the tabs were still loaded when I clicked through them.
- I've seen poorly made websites taking gigabytes of RAM before. It's not firefox' fault they do that.
  
  True that, I just thought it was crazy. I had recently upgraded to 96 gigs of RAM and I just never imagined a browser would actually suck up that much.
- I can't wait for Servo to be finished so I can move away from Firefox, it uses way too much memory.
  
  Servo won't protect you against shitty websites gobbling up memory.
  
  I'm so hyped as well! Just read their monthly update blog today actually! I'm mostly hyped because it's the first actual new web browser in a very, very long time, and that's just plain exciting!

Adeptus mechanicus would be proud of this dude.

I ran into the same issue on my PC.

This is some S tier trolling.
- What?
  
  Listen, not even Dexter is the kind of person to leave thirty tabs open for two weeks. You would have to be some kind of insane serial killer to do stuff like that.

which OS do you have? maybe parts of firefox have been moved to swap or compressed memory
- Windows 11.

106 comments