Firefox Community Forum

I'm running Win11, v25H2, os 26200.8524 on a Dell laptop. Firefox v151.0.3 (64-bit) is behaving a bit odd in that I can open a window, open maybe 2 or 3 tabs, close all but one down, and if I check Task Manager it'll show multiple Firefox apps open, sometimes as many as 20+, and the disk usage/storage is usually between 750MB and 1.2GB. I can see if I had multiple windows or tabs open that the number of apps in Task Mgr would be equal, but if I've only got one or two tabs open and Task Mgr shows I've got 23 open? I have gone into Firefox/Settings/Privacy and Security and selected "Never Remember History" so that if I click on History in the main menu bar it never asks me if I want to clear history, but it will show "Recently Closed Tabs" for whatever tabs I may have opened during that Firefox session. But again, if it shows I have 4 recently opened tabs, why would Task Mgr be showing 18 (for example) open instances?

I have not activated Firefox VPN, I have Enhanced Tracking Protection set to "Standard", I do not have A-I turned on, I don't usually use Private Windows, and I don't have any 'extensions' or 'add-ons' installed - I'm using pretty much the 'standard' Firefox installation. I have Norton 360 VPN installed but rarely turn it on. If this makes any difference, I did try out Privacy Badger about 3 months ago for about 2-3 weeks, but it got so odd that I uninstalled it. Interestingly/oddly enough, about half the websites I visit multiple times a week still give me a pop-up message saying "We see that you're using an ad-blocker, would you like to turn it off?" but I can't turn it off if there's nothing installed. To see if I could stop this 'phantom ad-blocker' I even went so far as to "refresh Firefox", but actually I'm getting more instances of websites telling me "turn off ad-blocker so we can make some money out of you!!!" since the refresh.

This is annoying, not life-threatening but since I've had other problems with low disk storage/ high usage, I try to keep an eye on it and Firefox using ~1GB of space doesn't help the situation. I had asked about Privacy Badger a couple weeks ago and the answer was pretty much "if it's uninstalled, it's not working"... so that was pretty much a dead end.

Ideas?

before v151.0.2, didn't have a problem with firefox, now with this new release, it is really really slow, takes some time to start and load pages. what happened??

On iGPU hardware, default dedicated VRAM is usually 0.5GB and the maximum is 2GB.

On my laptop Firefox only use 0.48GB(dedicated VRAM)/0.2GB(shared VRAM) when I set VRAM to auto(512MB) in BIOS.

The screenshot is when I set dedicated VRAM to 2GB in BIOS, and you can see the VRAM usage has increased to 1GB(dedicated)/0.5GB(shared).

It seems Firefox is restrict itself to dedicated VRAM and not fully utilize the vast amount of shared GPU memory. This makes sense on dGPU hardware but not on iGPU hardware. On iGPU hardware, the negligible amount of dedicated GPU memory exists only for compatibility to legacy programs, and Firefox should allocate all it's GPU memory from the shared GPU memory pool.

I have tried for several days to get Firefox to use this GPU; I cannot. Chrome, and Edge use this GPU without issues.

I am using Firefox 151.0 (64-bit) 20260516144017 on Windows 11 Pro 25H2, 26200.8457 Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU with latest driver: NVIDIA RTX Driver Release R595 U4 (596.36) Tue Apr 28, 2026.

Windows > System > Display > Graphics > Firefox GPU preference: High Performance (NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU)

Firefox Settings: General > Performance:

unchecked Use recommended performance settings
 checked    Use hardware acceleration when available

My latest combination of settings are:

gfx.webrender.all = true gfx.webrender.force-disabled = false

webgl.default-low-power = false webgl.disable-wgl = false webgl.disabled = false webgl.enable-prototype-webgl2 = true webgl.force-enabled = true

I have tried several combination of settings to no avail.

I always get: about:support > Graphics > Compositing: WebRender (Software).

Any help is very appreciated -- thank you.

The GPU isn't working properly... I've attached screenshots of the browser I have installed. If needed, I can take any logs, etc. It's very frustrating - I have a fairly old processor and its GPU isn't working properly! If needed, I can create a thread on the forum and attach any information about my system. Sorry if I'm in the wrong place! Best regards, and thank you for the best browser in the world!

I open Firefox and Chrome with the exact same page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/

Chrome is using 296 MB while Firefox is using 590 MB.

What am I doing wrong?

Hey there since a week when I brows with Firefox on Windows desktop the RAM uses jumped from around 60% spiked to 92-95% RAM and that changed just come a long a week ago. If change brows like Chrome different story, back down at 65. So you can also see a massive number on Firefox system running.

Question: Whats the reason for the change? What happend?

Best, Janosch

Anyone else had problems the last two weeks with performance? I'm on a macbook (Tahoe 26.3.1) and in the last two weeks tabs are constantly crashing or freezing. I have never had this before. It's doing my head in and I'm about to make the painful move over to Chrome if nobody has any ideas how to fix it?! I don't want to do that as all my bookmarks etc are set up on Firefox...

bold text On brand new DELL Alien-ware laptop with Windows 11 Firefox sometimes takes 30 seconds to open, Also once it is closed it cannot immediately open again. Error message shows Firefox is already opened and asks me to close it.

In the task manager under Apps running I see Firefox(12) when only the home page is open. Are those 12 hidden tabs or 12 parallel applications?

Have I made some errors in the Setup?

I am running an iMac Catalina 10.15.7. Since Firefox just updated itself my system keeps crashing so bad that I have to do a hard shut down. Yesterday I had to do this over a dozen times to get through my session. Firefox was the last browser compatible with my Mac. Is this no longer the case?

Fox version 150.0 is consuming all available system RAM after the latest update. What's going on? I've been using this browser for years, and this is the first time I've encountered such problems! The tips in optimization guide aren't helping!

My problem may not be from the same cause, but I'm experiencing the same issue. Ever since my MacBook M3 Max updated to Tahoe, Firefox has been draining my battery incredibly fast. Before Tahoe, I could count on 8-9 hours of constant work with mixed use of higher processing work. Now, I'm lucky to get 4 hours of light browsing. Before I totally blame Apple, has anyone else experienced a recent shift?

HI i have an ASUS-VivoBook laptop that has an intel i5 10th gen and geforce mx250 with 8gb ddr4 ram when i use firefox it uses about 550 mb ram alone on one page only is that supposed to happen ? if not how can i reduce my ram usage and power usage from settings and thank you for this amazing web browser i realy like the animated castle town from deltarune theme i am never going back to chrome THANKS ALOT

Dlaczego FIREFOX spowalnia i często karty się samoczynnie przeładowują? Nie zdążysz jednego artykułu przeczytać i się wszystko odświeża, cały czas się odświeża. Na konkurencyjnych przeglądarkach MICROSOFT EDGE i AVG SECURE BROWSTER cały czas działające odświeżanie nie występuje !!!!!

henn typing website keeps going to about blank/ crashes all time/ locks up unable to open sites like home depot/autozone xtra slow respondes. must be time to use something else firefox has gotten unusable