Latest Firefox version said to eat up system RAM

Apr 20, 2020 10:05 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla Firefox has long been considered the main alternative to Google Chrome, with many praising its low resource usage, but it looks like everything has changed in the latest update for the browser.

The new Firefox has become quite a memory hog, users now complain, with a thread on reddit indicating that Mozilla’s browser eats up much more RAM than Google Chrome.

While this is something that nobody would have imagined a couple of years ago, users complain that Firefox can sometimes even crash systems with a limited amount of RAM due to this increased resource usage.

Feedback needed

“You are not the only one affected by this. I've even started to face sluggish behaviour with 2 or 3 tabs where Chrome keeps the sanity. I have a PC with 4GB RAM and the impact is visible. Multiple users including myself reported this issue. Currently waiting for devs to address the issue,” one user on reddit explains.

“I've been having the same issue I thought I was going insane, I thought my browser was infected with malware or something. As long as I've been using Firefox it's never hogged this much memory before. I hope the devs fix this in the next update because this is very annoying,” someone else adds.

At this point, the only thing you can do is just let Mozilla know about this issue, and instructions to send feedback on RAM are available in the linked reddit thread.

Meanwhile, Firefox has become the third most-used browser worldwide, after the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge managed to secure the second place. Google Chrome continued to be the number one browser (both on the desktop and mobile) with a market share that gets close to 70 percent, which means that nearly 7 in 10 PCs out there run this browser.