Firefox 53 loads nearly 1/2 gb in RAM, twice what Safari does. Why?
Luckily there is a RAM chip to increase the mem in my Macbookpro from 4GB to 6. It made a huge speed difference. Apple's El Capitan loads more than 300 programs into RAM at boot-up, and with only 4 GB swapping begins in a jiffy. Now load Firefox 53 and that eats 1/2 GB RAM just to load. That's twice what Safari needs.
C'mon, Mozilla, try to do better.
All Replies (5)
Start Firefox in Safe Mode {web link} by holding down the <Shift> (Mac=Options) key, and then starting Firefox.
A small dialog should appear. Click Start In Safe Mode (not Refresh). Is the problem still there?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-slow-how-make-it-faster
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-many-cpu-resources-how-fix
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-hangs-or-not-responding
When v.53 climbed to 688mb RAM, I re-installed v.52. But I'll look at those suggestions. Thanks.
In safe mode v.53 still loaded 441 mb at start. Double Safari's space. Always liked Firefox until Apple over-bloated OX S to set a Guinness record for slow. As a result, Firefox is now only used for private browsing. It's much better at that than Safari.
Multi-process Firefox is codenamed "e10s".
Try to disable multi-process tabs in Firefox. You can disable multi-process tabs in Firefox by setting the related prefs to false on the about:config page.
browser.tabs.remote.autostart = false browser.tabs.remote.autostart.2 = false
http://www.ghacks.net/2016/07/22/multi-process-firefox/
Type about:config<enter> in the address bar. If a warning screen comes up, press the Be Careful button. At the top of the screen is a search bar.
With browsers tabs = false there’s still a 426 mb load at start-up vs. Safari’s 245.