I-Firefox Community Forum

I'm having huge memory problems with Firefox. In about:performance I can see that the extensions process takes up way too much memory. When I start Firefox it usually shows a memory usage of around 180MB. However, at some point the memory usage of the extensions process starts to increase and it doesn't stop increasing until my RAM is full and then it increases even further. It increases until I restart Firefox or until it uses so much RAM that my computer runs incredibly slow.

Below you can see a screenshot of the Task Manager showing how much RAM is available on my computer and a screenshot of the about:performance page showing the memory usage of the Extensions process. The RAM available on my laptop is 10GB (the default configuration was 4GB of soldered RAM plus 4GB of exchangeable RAM. I have upgraded from 4+4GB to 4+8GB but 2GB of the soldered RAM on this laptop are used as GPU memory so the remaining RAM is 10GB). The about:performance screenshot shows a memory usage of 13GB for the extensions process which is possible because Windows automatically pages RAM on the SSD when I'm running low on available physical memory. This enables programs to actually use more memory than the available physical RAM but of course programs become incredibly slow when the RAM is full and huge parts of memory have to be paged on the SSD.

My actual question: How can I find the cause of these memory problems?

What I've tried so far

- I have created a memory report on about:memory. The result is at the bottom of this post. - I have watched the about:performance page and tried to find out what action triggers the memory usage of the extensions process to increase. At the start of the browsing session the memory usage is only at around 180MB. It stays like that for a while. At some point it starts to steadily increase by many GBs. But I couldn't find the cause. I don't know what triggers the extensions process to increase memory usage. - I could simply disable extensions and see if the problem gets solved. But I want to know which exact extension causes this problem. It is very difficult to find out which one it is because I have many extensions and I don't know what causes the memory usage to increase. So I would have to disable extensions one by one and wait for an indefinite amount of time and check whether memory usage stays low. But I don't know how long I have to wait until the memory usage would increase because I couldn't identify what triggers it to increase.

Rather than just using trial and error I would like to find a way to use debugging tools to exactly determine what causes the problem.

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This (https://pastebin.com/U3QXTAt9) is the memory report from about:memory. This contains the whole extension (pid 18332) section (copy & pasted by selecting the text on the about:memory page). I have left out the rest because I don't know if it contains private data. Please note: this is not taken from the same browsing session as the screenshot that shows a memory usage of 13GB. Why? Because programs run very slow when memory is low and large parts of memory are being paged. The debug tools usually require a lot of RAM and CPU performance so it's very difficult to use the debug tools when the memory is already full and programs are already running slow. This memory report shows a very high memory usage of the extensions process. In this case it's "only" 3.5GB but it was taken in an early stage of the increasing memory usage. As shown in the screenshot below, memory usage can go even higher than the available physical RAM on my computer. The memory report doesn't clearly show which extension is responsible for the high memory usage. In the memory report, I can only see a high memory usage for the items gc-buffers and gc-heap which leads me to think that the memory problem has something to do with the garbage collector. However, I cannot see which extension is responsible for this. No item in this list with a description that identifies a specific extension has a high memory usage. This is only an excerpt from the memory report (only the extension section). I went through the whole memory report with Ctrl + F "moz-extension" and looked for items with a high memory usage but I didn't find a single item with high memory usage that belongs to a specific extension.

When i create an account in blue named AK-M AK-M will not appear on the screen- There i find instead "Neuer Tab" ... How to solve this Problem? Thanks for any hints. Josef Schwendt

I need to add the extension icon back to the toolbar. It had quit functioning, so I removed it, and now I can't figure out how to add it back in. I also can't find an extension that will allow me to directly email a browser page.

Thank you!

I downloaded the trust wallet extension, used a memoric phrase to import a wallet. It kept saying invalid memoric phrase, but after a about 30 minuets passed my wallet was emptied... so that was a hacked or bogus extension file.

Literally every single extensions I try to download says Installation aborted because the add-on appears to be corrupt. I don't know why because I just downloaded firefox.

I'm using Firefox, updated to version 140.0.4, on my Windows 11 laptop. Since Edge is my primary browser, I normally only use Firefox for two particular websites that don't work well in Edge. Beginning in March 2025, I've had a strange problem with one of those websites. In certain situations, words or phrases pop up in text boxes, meaning that if I want to type something, I first have to delete the word or phrase. Since it's a game website (not a video type game -- actually contract bridge) and the game is somewhat time-sensitive, this is very annoying. The words and phrases are ones that are appropriate to the website (i.e., not random), and seem to be the same in each session. That's why I labeled this as a "clipboard-related" issue.

Clearing the cache seems to help for a short time, but the problem always returns. <Ctrl>-F5 also helps, but seems to work for some text boxes but not others. In fact, <Ctrl>-F5 works for one type of text box, the type that I use most often, for the remainder of that session. But if I use one of the other text boxes, it doesn't help.

If that isn't strange enough, there are two additional oddities: For the other text boxes, the ones that are unaffected by <Ctrl>-F5, if I continue to use them, they eventually stop popping up words and phrases, again just for the remainder of that session.

The other oddity is that I'm using the free version of the LastPass plugin, and every time one of these words or phrases pops up, the LastPass symbol (a red box with three white dots) also appears at the right of the text box. This is completely inappropriate, since these text boxes have nothing to do with logging in or passwords. For this reason, I'm going to try to contact LastPass to ask about the same issue. However, their support isn't very responsive, so I'm hoping that somebody in the Mozilla forum will have a solution.

As I said, the problem only occurs on this one bridge website, and although I've been using Firefox to access it for several years, the issue never occurred before March 2025.

I'm trying to report a rogue version of this add-on, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/feedback/addon/%7B5c474add-03f0-4c67-9479-f32939d7599a%7D/. The actual add-on is fine and works well. Somehow a version, 1.5, got installed and I cannot keep it removed. Whenever I refresh FF, it shows back up. I cannot find any reference to this version on GitHub or on the extensions page. I have uninstalled FF and refreshed it. Nothing works. It keeps coming back. I also looked in the side-install directory, but there were no extensions there. If I remove the extension under the Add-ons Manager, it removes it and I can install it and it installs the correct version and it works until FF restarts and then the 1.5 version shows back up.

Hello everyone,

Is there any software that allows software developers to see what the CSS they are creating is doing in real time ?

Because I can't imagine they're doing it blindly. I see some CSS files that have hundreds, possibly thousands, of lines.

If there is software that helps them see immediately what their CSS is doing, can it be used to create extensions (add-ons) for Firefox ?

Thank you for your attention.

Audio Equalizer and Amplifier(https://addons.mozilla.org/ru/firefox/addon/audio-equalizer-and-amplifier/) extension on Yandex Music(https://music.yandex.ru/) doesn't work, which was noticed only in Firefox. In other browsers, it worked correctly and without any problems, I don't understand what the problem is. PC rebooted, browser restarted, the extension uninstalled and installed again. How can this be fixed? The extension worked correctly in Chrome and Edge.