Users complain that Firefox uses too much RAM

Chrome was known as a “memory killer” because of its high memory usage. In contrast, Firefox, which uses less memory, has become an alternative for many people. However, after the release of Firefox 75, many users said that upgrading to the latest version of Firefox consumes more memory than Chrome.

The reason is that a user posted a post on Reddit saying that he made a comparison and found that Firefox 75 takes up more memory than Chrome. He first disabled the Firefox 75 extension and did not open any tabs. At the same time, keep all Chrome extensions enabled and only open one tab. At this time, the memory usage of the two is as follows, Firefox takes about 240MB of memory, and Chrome takes about 100MB of memory.

Then, this user enabled the extension of Firefox, at this time it consumes about 500MB of memory, while Chrome opens the same number of tabs, the memory usage remains within 300-350MB. The system used is Ubuntu 19.10.

Many users in the replies said that they encountered the same situation. Some people said that they would freeze when they opened 2-3 tabs with Firefox, but Chrome handled the same number of tabs very easily.

In the post comments, there was a reply from a member of the Firefox development team. He said that occasionally a certain version of Firefox will consume more memory than Chrome. The reason is that every few months Mozilla developers review Firefox’s memory usage and try to optimize it. Then add new features that lead to increased memory usage (usually due to new security features that require large amounts of memory, or due to prototype features that have not been optimized), and so on.