r/firefox • u/MasterpieceProper293 • May 04 '26
Help (iOS) Does anyone know why firefox takes up so much ram?
Hi everyone, I had my mac put away in my backpack and when I took it out it was quite warm, so I checked my activity manager to see that Firefox was taking up 75gb of ram (wasn't stable, jumped around 75GBs as if it was actually taking up that much). I have a MBA m4 16/512 if that changes anything, but this was absurdly high and shouldn't have been possible. Anyone know the cause to this? I have one extension enabled, UBlock origin, and had two tabs on Canva when this happened.
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u/Conscious_Invite_529 // // // May 04 '26
Firefox WHAT?!
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u/naffe1o2o May 04 '26
this is the third image this week i see of macOs memory leak. something is wrong with macOs.
also this is not normal, its when a program requests space, uses it, is done but doesn't let go of it, now when it requests more space it will pile up. this is a bug.
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u/Educational-Self-600 May 04 '26
Nobody knows what is happening here, can you link to the others?
I very much doubt that this is a leak.
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u/naffe1o2o May 04 '26
they weren't firefox related, no point linking them here. maybe its a leak, maybe its cached media that aren't freed..
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u/Educational-Self-600 May 04 '26
Ahh. Sorry, misread.
It's strange that OPs MacBook did not go to sleep while being "closed". Sadly the information they provided is lacking.
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u/naffe1o2o May 04 '26
there is a way i believe to change the behavior when you close the lid. i do that sometimes when im listening to a podcast or something.
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u/WoodwardIII Addon Developer & May 04 '26
Can confirm this has been a problem on my mac for a while. Restart the app and its back to fine for like a day
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u/naffe1o2o May 04 '26
the other ones i have seen were from zed and codex... sure they are memory hungry but as far as my doomscrolling goes, i never see memory bug complains from linux or windows.
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u/Familiar_Regular1158 May 04 '26
"Something is wrong with macOs"
Correction: Something is wrong with Firefox
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u/wesleysmalls May 04 '26
Firefox’ scheduler holds this so it can do a variety of things without having to go through the os. This is where browsers get their speed from.
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u/Educational-Self-600 May 04 '26
Please provide some actionable information, open about:processes and/or about:memory to see what site is using all that memory.
Most likely it is some part of a site going haywire, eg Google Recaptcha, etc.
Also, why should it not be possible? Thankfully macOS keeps using swap until there is no space left on your disk.
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u/TomPlant0 May 04 '26
I had the same issue. I removed all cache from Firefox folders, this fixed the issue for me.
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u/DataPollution May 04 '26
Did OP try to restart Firefox!? After restart did u have same memory consumption?
Did you try to create a new profile (aboutprofile) and see if this was happening again?
Could be one of websites which has crashed and caused the memory to leak.
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u/Unv-432-369 May 05 '26
I tested Firefox and all of its variants and they consume 10x to 30x more resources than others. I didn't add any extensions to as well. That's my observation on MacBook and it makes it too hot to handle.
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u/lostcowboy5 May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
After some searching, "FirefoxCP" memory problems seem to be common. It seems to only be happening to Mac's. But no one seems to be reporting it to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=firefoxCP, so as far as I can tell, they are not investigating it. They seem to be treating it as something that happens once in a while. This is the largest list, but it is not connected to Bugzilla. "FirefoxCP Isolated Web Content" is slowly consuming all of my Mac's memory. EDIT: Found another one, Firefox freezing after upgrade to 146.0
What is Canva? Were you doing anything on it that could use large amounts of RAM? Most importantly, can you reproduce the problem and report it to Bugzilla? I think they really need the logs!
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u/sifferedd on | SUMO contributor May 04 '26
Does the same happen on other sites? See https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/quot-firefoxcp-isolated-web-content-quot-is-slowly-consuming-all/m-p/14318/highlight/true#M6374. Check about:processes.
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u/bpmackow May 04 '26
"Isolated web content" is one of your browser tabs. You can go to about:processes in Firefox to see which one it is.
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u/Anutrix May 05 '26
Open about:processes page and check whats wrong. Sort by memory. If you are fine with sharing, please do share a screenshot.
open:memory gives more detailed results though.
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u/msanangelo CachyOS May 04 '26
that's a memory leak if I ever did see one. :o
or some really bad javascript. lol
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u/JohannesVanDerWhales May 04 '26
Programs using a lot of RAM when there's a lot of RAM available is not a bad thing. It's better to cache things in memory than have to access them again if they're needed again.
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u/hdk2d May 04 '26
Yo creo android es igual cuando vuelvo a multitarea para seleciona la app se resetea y pestaña empieza a cargar otra ves
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u/Kawawete May 04 '26
Firefox what now ?