Youtube viewing corrupting firefox/windows 10
I seem to have a 'bug' being introduced through firefox when I view youtube videos. it does not happen right away, it takes a few videos to happen. The partial solution I have found so far (having done this twice so far in almost as many days, and about to do it a second in one day.) is to do a complete uninstall of firefox, then do a windows defender offline scan (which seems to knock out whatever is left in the machine, it won't tell me what was found.) then to come back into win10 and doing a clean install which seems to work well enough (having multiple tabs open [I do miss being able to have large numbers of open tabs and not having my machine going nuts]) till I break down and check the youtube channels that I like to keep up with. main noticeable symptom is my machines cooling fan going into 'hyper' drive, then checking task manager and finding firefox using almost two gigs of memory and 40+% of cpu capacity. As I type this, with just one tab open, firefox is showing 563.3 MB and seven (7) sub? programs running. Before this latest flair up, for one tab open it would be under 400MB and five programs running?
Add-ons I run on Firefox: uBlock Origin, Adblock Plus, and DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials
My system: AMD A9-9425 RadeonR5,5 Compute Cores 2C+3G 3,10GHz
8GB of ram 7.45 usable
WIN 10 Home Ver. 1909 {64 bit}
OS Build 18363.997
All Replies (4)
Start Firefox in Safe Mode {web link}
A small dialog should appear. Click Start In Safe Mode (not Refresh). Is the problem still there?
Yes but to a slightly lesser extent, but with added pointless advertising Still peaking above 70% on CPU and 900+MB of memory when playing a video and having a second tab on a non video but ad glutted site. WinDefender looked to be staying quite in the background also. Possible miss-match in the add-on department? Possible hardware not up to what I’m used to? I have an older machine with Win 10 vers 1907 but with 5 add-ons running in firefox with none of these issues (AMD A6-5200 APU with Radeon HD8400 same amount of ram)
Laptop or desktop?
I'm not sure what it is called in Win10, but in Win7 when opening the Task Manager > Performance tab you can view the CPU Usage (on each "Core") and Memory "loads".
Most likely the processor cores are being "pushed" pretty hard and resulting in a heat load that caused the fan to work harder. At least that is what I see happening for me on my desktop. Haven't had a laptop for 12 years, but looking at getting a new one soon.
Not a "Bug" in Firefox, but updating video drivers has helped me sometimes.
Firefox "reads" the hardware and self-adjusts to a limited extent to do it's best to maximize Firefox features and performance. Sometimes the user has to step in and "back off" a setting or two. I don't get into that after the first few years of using a new computer; ain't gonna waste my time as technology advances beyond the older hardware.
Plus YouTube tends to push PC's hard. I tend to restart Firefox after a dozen or so YT videos, especially when I have many partially loaded channels pre-loaded and waiting. "Eyes bigger that your stomach type situation." IOW, like you want to watch more than the computer can handle in one sitting. Those extra pre-loaded tabs are overloading Firefox due to those tabs waiting for you to open them and sucking the RAM and cores down too much.
Sorry, I can't help beyond my observations and suggesting updated video drivers. I assembled my own desktops and never once that I didn't need to update video drivers during the post-assembly testing process. And that was with components that were at or over the production time span of each. I buy EOL and clearance table retail store components routinely. And get 6 or more years out of each one that I have built routinely.
It had not occurred to me about the video drivers. I had recently reinstalled Win10 without all the HP baggage of which a video driver is part of, so now I've installed from AMD their latest driver for my set up. now to see how it does (fingers crossed).