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multiple firefox processes in windows 10

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I have multiple firefox processes in my task manager. When I end these processes, the next time I open firefox I get additional firefox processes. I currently have seven. How do I stop this from happening

I have multiple firefox processes in my task manager. When I end these processes, the next time I open firefox I get additional firefox processes. I currently have seven. How do I stop this from happening

Réiteach roghnaithe

Perfect. Like I said, that setting only applies to the processes that are used to run web content, so you will still have multiple processes listed for Firefox. There's no way to merge everything into a single process.

If you are interested in seeing what each process is being used for, you can go to the about:memory page in Firefox and press the Measure button. This will give you a complete detailed breakdown of the memory used by each process, but you can look at the right side in the Process Index section to see the processes and what they are used for.

For example, I have Main Process, three Web Content, Privileged Content, WebExtensions and RDD processes.

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This is normal.

For some time now, Firefox has been using a feature called multiprocessing. Many other programs use the same approach. Rather than running everything in a single Firefox process, the various parts of Firefox are split into different processes. For example, the main browser UI, any add-ons you have installed, any graphics being displayed and the websites that you have open may all be in their own process.

There are numerous security and performance benefits to this program design. For example, if a website crashes, only the process that it was running in will crash or freeze, not the entire Firefox browser.

What you can do, if you really want to, is you can set the maximum number of content processes that Firefox is allowed to make. You'll still see multiple processes listed for the parts of the browser, but all of the websites that you open will be limited to the number of processes that you have set. Generally, it's ideal just to let Firefox decide based on your system performance, but you can manually override this if you want.

To do that, go to the Firefox settings page and scroll down to the Performance section. You can uncheck the Use recommended performance settings checkbox to enable some hidden settings. One of those settings is the Content process limit setting, which can be set to a number between 1 and 8. You may need to restart Firefox to see any change.

Hope this helps.

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I set the Content process limit to 1 and restarted Firefox. I checked the task manager after rebooting the computer and now have 5 Firefox processes.

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Réiteach Roghnaithe

Perfect. Like I said, that setting only applies to the processes that are used to run web content, so you will still have multiple processes listed for Firefox. There's no way to merge everything into a single process.

If you are interested in seeing what each process is being used for, you can go to the about:memory page in Firefox and press the Measure button. This will give you a complete detailed breakdown of the memory used by each process, but you can look at the right side in the Process Index section to see the processes and what they are used for.

For example, I have Main Process, three Web Content, Privileged Content, WebExtensions and RDD processes.