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I'd like to know how heavy your browsing is in terms of the number of tabs and windows that are open. In my experience chrome blazes it's competition when it doesn't have as many tabs open since it inhales the RAM unlike Firefox whose default behaviour is lazy loading.

This also frees up my RAM for other memory intensive operations leading me to use Firefox more often.




Typical day, at the end of the day (machine has been up for 8+ hours) I'll have 20-30 tabs (or more) open across 5+ Firefox windows.

Some of those tabs will be lightweight, like GitLab issues, forums or webpages I'm building, whereas others will be more complex sites and web apps... Office 365 apps, YouTube, social networks, Figma instances etc.

Firefox will consume sometimes 4GB or more by the end of the day.

I run an i7-7700K and 32GB of RAM though, so it's never going to get near a low-memory situation. I'll end the day with about 50% total system memory consumption... no app is individually too demanding, just I run a ton of things simultaneously and because there's so much RAM available, Windows never has to take action to kill anything or reclaim memory back again.

This is particularly evident in UWP apps (although I hardly ever use them)... if I open one at 9am and close it, I can then reopen at 9pm and it will be there instantaneously despite effectively being cold start from user perspective, because it's been suspended in RAM all day!

Right now I'm sitting at 50.2% RAM consumption, of which Firefox is using 2.1 GB over 7 processes.

Next biggest are Figma (400 MB on a big document), Microsoft Teams, Spotify... oh yeah, Electron RAM usage is still abominable. But I don't need to worry about it ;)




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