Firefox (8) - what's this about?

Firefox has been monstrously eating memory recently and when I check task manager it will show the firefox log with a bracketed number, e.g.(6) but I only have one tab open. I was only watching youtube videos and the damn thing was eating 2.5gb of memory.

amancandance said:

Firefox has been monstrously eating memory recently and when I check task manager it will show the firefox log with a bracketed number, e.g.(6) but I only have one tab open. I was only watching youtube videos and the damn thing was eating 2.5gb of memory.

Hi amancandance, you only have one tab open but that doesn't mean that only one process will run, the amount of processes that run in Firefox depend not only in the amount of tabs you have open but also in the amount of extensions and plugins you use. This is Multiprocess (sandboxing) in Firefox, it isolates activities in tabs from each other. Its supposed to give better stability (Example: if one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn't crash) and better security.

You can lower the amount of processes Firefox uses in Options but the way to get Firefox back to the way it used to be, using only one process instead of many is by disabling Multiprocess. You need to create a System variable with the name and value below:

Variable name: MOZ_FORCE_DISABLE_E10S
Variable value: 1

When you are done, it ll look like this:



I do this, this is the one way to get Firefox back to using one process.

Bo

bo elam said:

Hi amancandance, you only have one tab open but that doesn't mean that only one process will run, the amount of processes that run in Firefox depend not only in the amount of tabs you have open but also in the amount of extensions and plugins you use. This is Multiprocess (sandboxing) in Firefox, it isolates activities in tabs from each other. Its supposed to give better stability (Example: if one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn't crash) and better security.

You can lower the amount of processes Firefox uses in Options but the way to get Firefox back to the way it used to be, using only one process instead of many is by disabling Multiprocess. You need to create a System variable with the name and value below:

Variable name: MOZ_FORCE_DISABLE_E10S
Variable value: 1

When you are done, it ll look like this:



I do this, this is the one way to get Firefox back to using one process.

Bo

By reducing the number of processes, will that limit the behavior of extensions? Malwarebytes browser extension for example?

amancandance said:

By reducing the number of processes, will that limit the behavior of extensions? Malwarebytes browser extension for example?

Your extensions will work exactly the same. You wont notice any difference in behavior of extensions as there is none.

Bo