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Why Does a Single Firefox Tab Take Almost 1.5GB RAM?

5•syeare•2h ago
There are no extensions besides uBlock Origin and Saka Key running Only a single message with some short text and code is open This is on a "cold start" after installing updates 16GB is definitely nowhere near enough anymore, it's almost like how 2GB was in 2016

Comments

sminchev•2h ago
There is Javascript interpreter, caches and other memory consuming things ;)
syeare•1h ago
For a single tab? I wonder how much the telemetry takes up...
HerbManic•2h ago
I suspect a lot of it is just a premptive cache. My daily runner laptop is a 2009 Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and Firefox only uses about 1.5GB max when there is about 20 tabs open. It tries to fit in with whatever system it is running on.

Back in 2006 I remember using Firefox on a WinXP system with only 128MB of RAM, while the start up time was dreadful, once it had finally mapped out the memory/swapped all the right parts to the HDD it was surprisingly snappy. I would guess it is still doing something like that now only it doesn't have to swap it out anywhere.

syeare•1h ago
Truly intriguing! A core2duo+4GB RAM in 2026?!?!!!

Can you elaborate on your experience? I can't imagine 20tabs being smooth on 8GB with the modern "web" being whst it is today, let alone 4GB! Unless there is only text files and plain HTML in those 20 tabs???

syeare•1h ago
Although I'd like to read and respond to the reply made by Emre_Ozkan, it is unfortunately [flagged] and [dead]

Quite disappointing whenever I see this type of...of censorship, would this be considered??? I am sure there are many interesting perspectives and this is not the first occurrence of burying comments and/or responses that I have observed as a longtime lurker

Why Does a Single Firefox Tab Take Almost 1.5GB RAM?

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