If that happens again, open about:processes in a new tab (type into URL bar), and sort by memory. Take a screenshot, redact private things, and if you upload it here, it would be easier to help. Chances are it's a specific website that consumes that much RAM, or an addon
I've never seen Firefox use that much memory, even with lots of tabs open for weeks. Maybe you have an extension that's causing issues.
Can you share a list of the browser add-ons you're using, and if possible/not confidential the tabs you have open? Or at least the number of tabs?
Would make troubleshooting easier.
Also, is it a plain Firefox or any fork?
'Improve Youtube!'
600% sound volume
7TV
Auto Tab Discard
Better TTV
Libredirect
LiveTL
Privacy Badger
Tampermonkey (No scripts enabled)
Ublock
User-Agent Switcher and Manager
i'd say about 40 tabs, mix of:
Danbooru
Youtube
Kbin
Reddit
Amazon
game8.co
libreddit
Plain Firefox
Yeah, that many (dare I say sketchy) plugins, I'd decisively recommend seeing if you can reproduce the issue without them
To start Firefox without any plugins loaded, go from
Menu > Help > Troubleshoot Mode...
Probably not your problem unless you use Twitch constantly. But for me 7tv and BetterTV crashed Firefox all the time. Any streamer with 5k+ active chatters destroyed my browsing session with those two. I decided to remove them and rely on chatterino
My system is always on sleep when I turn my PC off and Firefox is always open. I close Firefox from system update to system update and it hasn't crashed on me for quite a long time. Hopefully this doesn't change.
Inactive tabs shouldn't cause a problem but you can use something like Simple Tab Groups to prevent them to stack too much, might help.
Having a bigger swap partition also might help, if you have 16 GB RAM.
Edit: Also just like others mentioned, try to run Firefox without any add-ons to see if that happens again. You can also do this in reverse, deactivating your add-ons one by one and use Firefox like that for a while, until the occurrence stops.
Instead of asking here, please open a bug report
I don't know how to do that.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi
Create an account, select Firefox, and enter all the required info. In Firefox under "about firefox" you can get the version info.
No idea what's actually happening, but it might also be one of the pages/sites using more and more resources wothout proper cleanup.
Reddit does this. Ever since they released their latest design they don't actually unload anything you've already viewed and pretty soon afterwards the site completely breaks.
Update: So far i'm down to 2 extensions:
Ublock
600% sound volume
Memory still ballooned from 1GB to 5GB.
When I checked processes before closing, even after force unloading Youtube under processes, GPU was using around 1 GB. There was literally nothing else I could unload that would stop this.
Again I loaded all tabs just to be fair...GPU is using half of that currently. I'm also questioning the reliability of about:processes to an extent, because I couldn't actually see what was adding up to the 5 GB I was seeing in task manager.
I also tried some advice I saw to just whitelist youtube, as it sounds like google does something regarding adblockers. But this did not seem to do anything noticable.
edit: based on another post, trying troubleshoot mode, though i'm always uncomfortable having all site blockers (ublock now) turned off.
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