From Newsgroup: comp.misc

I start Firefox, and before any web pages are opened it's already using
almost 700 Mb of memory. That's nearly three times the size of my first
hard disk.

What on Earth is it doing?

How did we get here?

Sylvia.
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From Newsgroup: comp.misc

Sylvia Else <sylvia@email.invalid> wrote:

I start Firefox, and before any web pages are opened it's already using >almost 700 Mb of memory. That's nearly three times the size of my first
hard disk.

What on Earth is it doing?

How did we get here?

It's libraries all the way down.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."
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From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On Tue, 13 Jan 2026 20:32:31 +0800, Sylvia Else wrote:

How did we get here?

One new HTML feature at a time.
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From Newsgroup: comp.misc

Sylvia Else <sylvia@email.invalid> wrote:

I start Firefox, and before any web pages are opened it's already using almost 700 Mb of memory. That's nearly three times the size of my first
hard disk.

I get around 300MB on Linux with Firefox 140ESR opened to my
default blank tab, but I've turned off lots of features I don't
want. It's still stupid when Dillo and Links start to a blank
page using just 4MB.

In about:performance everything there adds up to 261MB which is
34MB less than used RAM reported by "free" after subtracting RAM
still shown used after Firefox is closed (the computer isn't doing
much else). That computer has 2GB RAM total and it works for my
usage (I don't watch videos in Firefox, that's what video player
programs are for).

There's a comparison of memory use and other performance metrics
between versions here (text in the SVG graphs doesn't display in
Dillo unfortunately):

https://www.phoronix.com/review/firefox-benchmarks-120-141

What on Earth is it doing?

Maybe caching history data in RAM from the SQLite databases in your
profile? It also makes connections to Mozilla servers at start-up,
some with undisclosed purpose.

How did we get here?

I wish we didn't, and whenever I have half a chance to avoid it, I
don't. I use Dillo instead.
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From Newsgroup: comp.misc

Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:

Sylvia Else <sylvia@email.invalid> wrote:

I start Firefox, and before any web pages are opened it's already using >>almost 700 Mb of memory. That's nearly three times the size of my first >>hard disk.

What on Earth is it doing?

How did we get here?

It's libraries all the way down.

I doubt that's the problem, most of the libraries used by it
overall are for GTK3, and GTK3 programs aren't all as bad as that
for memory usage.

Well probably not as bad as that, it seems every other GTK program
I use is GTK2 or earlier.
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