Hey! I ran into the same issue before. Firefox uses multiple processes for tabs and extensions by default to improve stability, but it can overwhelm your system. You can try going to Settings → General → Performance and unchecking “Use recommended performance settings,” then lowering the “Content process limit” to something like 4–8. That usually keeps Firefox from spawning 80+ processes and helps with hanging/freezing.

Unfortunately, the version of Firefox I am using 144.0 for Windows, which I am told is the most current...does not provide the option of setting a content process limit. The only option is to allow use of a hardware accelerator.

There really is not a good alternative to allowing Firefox to open multiple processes for its own components and for site content (sites are isolated in different processes). You can see what the processes are for in Firefox's built-in Task Manager, Shift+Esc (or type/paste about:processes in the address bar and press Enter to load it).

If Firefox is using too much overall memory, perhaps something in the following article will help:

• Firefox uses too much memory or CPU resources - How to fix
• Recent option: Unload tabs to reduce system memory usage in Firefox