This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Causing game lag

more options

Hi, I'm writing this because this problem is very frustrating. Quite frequently my games (e.g. Valorant, Overwatch) will start lagging if I have Firefox open in the background. To fix this, I have to close and reopen Firefox. Sometimes, I would open a tab while gaming and that would also cause the game to lag.

In game, the ping starts at the normal level then rises before falling back down to normal.

Are there any solutions?

Regards Thomas

Hi, I'm writing this because this problem is very frustrating. Quite frequently my games (e.g. Valorant, Overwatch) will start lagging if I have Firefox open in the background. To fix this, I have to close and reopen Firefox. Sometimes, I would open a tab while gaming and that would also cause the game to lag. In game, the ping starts at the normal level then rises before falling back down to normal. Are there any solutions? Regards Thomas

All Replies (5)

more options

This could or couldn't be because of Firefox when high memory usage occurs when Gaming and trying to use system resources come into conflicts. You should only have one app running if your going to use online gaming that uses the internet your Browser uses to reduce system resources from conflicting for memory.

more options

Hi Thomas, next time you leave Firefox running in the background, could you open the about:processes page (type or paste about:processes in the address bar and press Enter to load it) and click the CPU column heading to sort by CPU usage. Then when you notice this problem, switch over to that page and see whether you can link it to a particular site that's open. (You also can use the page to close the tab, if a tab is causing it.)

more options

An easy way to find the about:processes about page in future is to remember about:about as it lists all about: urls for that version.

These about: urls use a colon : and not a space or period.

more options

Thanks for the replies.

After using about:processes, I could not find any relationship between the cpu or memory usage by any particular site with the problem I'm having in game.

Should I try uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox?

Regards

more options

Usually uninstall/reinstall doesn't resolve issues unless corrupted program files are the problem.

Possibly there is a way to give your game higher CPU priority with Windows so that other programs aren't allowed to lower its performance. I don't know the details of how you could do that.