Firefox Community Forum

Hi, I’ve noticed that Firefox often uses a lot of memory when I have multiple tabs open, even more than Chrome or Edge on the same number of tabs. Sometimes it slows down my system or makes switching between tabs laggy.

Is this normal behavior, or is there a way to reduce Firefox’s RAM usage without losing performance? Are there specific settings, add-ons, or troubleshooting steps I should try?

Thanks in advance!

Dear Firefox Support Team,

I am writing to report an issue I’ve been experiencing with Firefox on my MacBook Air (M3, 8GB RAM). Recently, Firefox has been becoming unresponsive quite often, and the Activity Monitor shows significantly high memory usage. For context, I typically have two Firefox windows running simultaneously, with approximately 5 tabs open in each window (10 tabs total). This is when I notice the performance degradation and high memory usage.

To help you investigate, I’ve attached:

• A screenshot of the memory usage in Activity Monitor when Firefox is running.
• A screenshot of the extensions currently enabled in Firefox.

I am open to suggestions, such as disabling or removing certain extensions if they might be causing conflicts. However, I wanted to report this issue first to understand if this is a known problem or if there are optimizations planned for Firefox on Apple Silicon Macs.

Let me know if you need additional details, such as Firefox version, macOS version, or specific steps to reproduce the issue. I’d be happy to provide any information that can help resolve this.

Thank you for your time and assistance. I look forward to your response.

Best regards, Hemant

I can complete the sign in and enter my password, and then I get a spinning wheel and can no longer click on the tabs or minimize the window. I have to force close it and it shows as not signed it. I've also tried signing in using my phone and the QR code, same thing. This happens with or without 2FA, I turned it off and the issue persists. Everything else about the browser works completely but I can't sync across devices without the Mozilla login working.

So out of nowhere, I can't use the back button, or delete pages by clicking the 'x. I can't even click on the settings icon, or any icon on the menu bar. When I hover over any web page title, it shows a small window of it, but I can't get rid of it. I didn't change anything, so what's going on?

Hi. Not sure how to tag this. I've turned off as many ai features in Firefox as I am able. I'm practically begging for this company not to add more. It slows the browser, it wastes energy, and to be honest? I don't want summaries of things I'm looking up, I don't want to be recommended apps or features, or chat to a bot, or have my sentences finished for me/help with writing beyond spell check. Google had a decent spelling and grammar checker and then they added gen ai garbage and now it sucks! PLEASE stop adding ai features to Firefox. It makes browsing impossible.

I often keep many tabs open for research, and Firefox memory usage grows significantly over time. Are there practical settings or habits that help manage memory without sacrificing usability?

Please stop adding AI to your browser. It is making it slower and is a data privacy concern for me as well as many others. If you do not remove them I will be switching browsers. AI is not only bad for the environment, it does not even do the features you want it to do correctly. Please remove AI from firefox, i have been using this browser for years and would hate to leave because you refuse to remove AI features nobody asked for.

The minimize, maximize, close line at the top of the screen is missing when Firefox opens. If I click the Firefox icon in the task manager to minimize it and click it again to maximize it, then the missing line at the top appears. This has been an ongoing glitch for a week or more. Perhaps you can fix this minor problem?

Having heard the news that Firefox's latest CEO wants to turn it into yet another AI-slop browser, I came to this forum to give feedback as an avid Firefox user over the last 4-5 years. I can see I'm not alone either; there are tons of other users who seem to feel the same way I do.

This is a very, VERY bad decision. So far, every "AI update" that has already hit Firefox has done nothing but make the browser worse and more inefficient. A few months ago, Mozilla was getting hit by complaints from desktop users about memory usage skyrocketing due to the implementation of an AI chatbot into Firefox. Now they've added AI search engines among other things. And surprise, surprise--no one seems to actually want to use these features. Why should we, if all it does is make computers run slower, overheat, and doesn't actually answer any useful questions or contribute anything meaningful?

I'm baffled at Mr. Enzor-DeMeo saying he wants to go all-in on making Firefox an "AI browser" with his whole chest in the SAME week that Microsoft has had to lower their growth targets for AI-related sales, some of them up to 50%, because NO ONE seems to actually be buying AI products. You know, on account of (you guessed it) not finding them very useful.

Other people have already mentioned the myriad of other problems with AI too, so I won't touch on those too much, other than to agree that AI is a plagiarism machine that's doing serious environmental damage. What I WILL say is that I personally have been using Firefox all this time specifically because it's avoided the AI craze as much as other browsers, or at the very least, avoided making it "opt-out" instead of "opt-in" to the same degree. But if this changes in the near future and Firefox does become yet another inefficient AI slopfest of a browser, I may seriously rethink my loyalty to Firefox and switch back to Chrome instead. After all, there would be functionally no difference between the two browsers anyway!

Please rethink this decision and consider actually listening to user feedback going forward. If Mozilla actually wants to retain their userbase, I'm sure I'm not the only person thinking about dropping Firefox for Chrome in the future.

Firefox has been using more RAM and CPU on my system recently, especially with only a few tabs open. Is this expected behavior, or are there specific settings, extensions, or configurations I should check to improve performance?

Firefox has been my entire family's browser of choice for as long as I can remember. Which one am I supposed to use now that Firefox won't quit shoving bloatware and diminished performance at me? I'm also seeing articles stating that they plan on making it even worse with more AI. I'm supposed to let them steal my data and turn my browser into sludge with absolutely no benefit to myself? And they're asking me to donate to them on top of it???

Does anyone know of a viable Firefox alternative that isn't a chrome dupe?

Hi!

I've had issues with Firefox now for quite a while and they only seem to be getting worse. Performance is really bad, it's lagging while browsing, especially infuriating when typing as the letters come out at a stuttering pace. I've tried disabling extensions one by one, I've tried troubleshoot mode and experienced no major difference.

If I can't solve this soon enough I won't be able to keep using Firefox, as the experience is so frustrating. And it would be a shame since I've come to like it quite much.

Thanks!

What causes Firefox to freeze when two video windows are opened, i.e. in a new tab, the video windows immediately start to freeze? I use Windows 11. Other browsers work fine, only Firefox freezes with two windows open.