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Firefox really needs to get it together. I use Chrome for work, Firefox for my personal gmail, and Safari for battery-conscious use.

Firefox is the browser I have to restart the most frequently, because otherwise it slows to a crawl, or hogs so much memory (Despite only having 1-2 open tabs) that I'm constantly paging on my MBP with 16GB of ram.

There's also little UI quirks, such as not being able to natively look up a word in OSX dictionary, that make browsing less pleasant.



Did you try to "refresh"? See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13227658


Long time Firefox user here. I use a metric shit-ton of addons, and customize everything drastically. "Refreshing" is a massive pain in the ass, as re-configuring everything while also maintaining the "clean settings" is just a difficult combination.

Despite this, I've completely wiped out both my settings and firefox install on several occasions in an attempt to keep things stable.

It doesn't help.

I'm aware that my addons are likely a big contributor to the memory-hogging and eventual crashes, but if I didn't want to use these addons, I'd just use fucking chrome. The ENTIRE point of Firefox is for the customizability. Dropping addons to improve stability just isn't an option for me.


about:performance gives no insights? It could be just one add-on that spoils it all, unfortunately.


Didn't know about this, neat. Regardless, my problem will stay, as I have no intention of removing anything.

I'll keep an eye on it to see if there's a specific addon triggering my issues, but it will likely stick around.


A thousand thanks for this, I didn't even know this existed.


Is there a discover ability plugin for features like that?


This feels like how I had to reinstall Windows98 every six months.


Same here. Firefox for the vertical tabs but slows to a crawl and hogs so much memory. Chrome for development.




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