Firefox can take care of itself, but if you find that it affects your other programs' performance by using too much memory, you can trade-off Firefox's security and performance for a reduced memory footprint. Try the steps in the following article to experiment with reducing the number of content processes and see whether it improves the situation:

• Firefox's performance settings
• Firefox uses too much memory or CPU resources - How to fix

If you were looking at the number of processes for other reasons, what's going on?

I'm sure I need to adjust my expectations around multi-process, my head is still in the 1-process-per-window mindset... so, what *should* I be adjusting first?

what *should* I be adjusting first?

What problem are you trying to solve?

If you only care about the number of processes, you can reduce those using the setting in the first of the above-referenced support article. Note:

• content processes may be used for tabs from any window, there is no association between windows and processes in multi-process Firefox (Firefox 48+)
• there will always be one to three more processes than the number of content processes

I should clarify that the Windows 8-10 Task Manager modified the tabs compared with the Windows 7 Task Manager. Processes now means something closer to "processes with a visible window" which is more similar to the old Applications tab than the old Processes tab (which is now the Details tab).

Thanks, perfectly prepared to adjust my thinking! What would you suggest for this 4GB (for now) laptop?

What would you suggest for this 4GB (for now) laptop?

What problem are you trying to solve?