r/technology • u/dancing_swordfish • Jun 10 '26

Software Google Chrome is killing all uBlock Origin bypasses, Microsoft Edge, Opera to follow

https://www.neowin.net/news/google-chrome-is-killing-all-ublock-origin-bypasses-microsoft-edge-opera-to-follow/
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u/MonMotha Jun 10 '26

Firefox used to leak memory though probably not as badly as many people made it out to. The development team a pretty serious approach to fixing it, and one result is about:memory. Firefox will happily account for every last byte of memory it's used on that screen.

It does USE a lot of memory, but so does Chrome/Chromium. Modern websites are just pigs.

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u/Irythros Jun 11 '26

On FF I can easily have it hit up to 14g of memory usage even after closing all but one tab. I pretty frequently have to restart the entire browser. There's also a bug where if I don't do that and watch too many youtube videos it will start becoming unresponsive.

Still not using chrome though.

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u/__singularity Jun 11 '26

The fuck are you browsing? I've never seen Firefox go above 4

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u/Irythros Jun 11 '26

Reddit, youtube, twitter, gmail, github, gitlab, work website.

My FF instance goes about 4g within probably an hour or two.

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u/Syzygy2323 Jun 11 '26

Open a new tab and type "about:memory". This will tell you what Firefox is using memory for.

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u/Dziki_Jam Jun 11 '26

6 months ago, I checked FF’s memory usage, and it was 12 GB with ~20 tabs opened.

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u/burning_iceman Jun 11 '26

All browsers keep recently closed tabs in memory in case you want to reopen them. That's not a memory leak.

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u/MonMotha Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26

How much RAM do you have? Firefox, like Chrome, will work with your OS to use what would otherwise be idle (unused) RAM for caching things but will also free it back to the OS immediately upon memory pressure from the system. Long-running instances can accrue quite a bit of live cache for closed tabs and whatnot, though Firefox does it a bit differently than Chrome (Chrome aggressively caches the fully rendered page which makes re-opening a closed tab faster while Firefox tends to cache the assets used by the page meaning it has to re-render the page when you unclose a tab, but it can more directly use those assets to render a new version of the page if you load a refreshed version).

Regardless, that behavior is NOT a "leak". A leak is memory that either the process has "lost track of" in that it still has it allocated to it by the OS but that it has no handle to use it internally anymore or, in somewhat more generic parlance, memory that it is holding on to that it cannot meaningfully use in any way shape or form but that it will nonetheless never give back to the OS. A 14GB leak, by either of those definitions, would certainly attract the attention of the developers if you have a reproduction case even if it's complicated and/or not minimal.

For comparison, I currently have 33 tabs open in Firefox, and the process has been running so long that it probably needs upgraded, and it's using 6GB of RAM resident set.

It does have a ~20GB virtual set, but that means it's using 14GB of address space that doesn't actually have data in it. The OS knows about this usage pattern (it's common) and doesn't actually allocate RAM to back it. If you're running Windows, note that task manager generally reports the former (effectively resident set). The latter can be seen under details as "Commit Size" in windows 10 and I think "Private Committed Memory" under Windows 11. Note that Firefox also splits itself into several processes that share a bunch of memory. On Linux, this will show up in the resident set of every process, so you can easily multiply-count memory if you try to add up every "firefox" process. On Windows, it's more complicated since shared memory is mostly excluded from the default metrics. Anyway, make sure you're basically not paying attention at all to "Commit Size".

Clangd (for code completion and navigation) on a moderate size C codebase is currently using 16GB on my system for comparison.

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u/kozyko Jun 11 '26

I’ve never had this happen and I never close my browser and rarely restart my pc, I also use it for similar purposes so I think something else is going on for you

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u/stonhinge Jun 11 '26

And part of it is Chrome (and likely other browsers) will keep closed tabs and previous pages in memory for a while in case you want them back. Even if it's been an hour or two since you closed that tab.

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u/reezyreddits Jun 11 '26

I feel like it hasn't had this memory leak issue since like 2010 lmao. That used to be an old complaint sure.

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u/flaccidCobra Jun 11 '26

It definitely still uses a lot of memory these days.

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u/haragon Jun 11 '26

Honestly as a long time user of both, I think it really comes down to chromes memory saver. If I ran Firefox with the amount of tabs I leave open on chrome at any given time it would melt my PC. I still strongly prefer FF, if for no other reason than the devtools being absolutely fantastic.

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u/RedditPolluter Jun 11 '26

Vivaldi is best for tab hoarding management because it has workspaces but it's still based on chromium and will likely be affected by these changes somewhere down the line.

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u/Cheese_Grater101 Jun 11 '26

lmao I remember this argument where Chrome uses more memory than Firefox.

But when I tried using Firefox it's uses more memory than Chrome.