Hello,

The Reset Firefox feature can fix many issues by restoring Firefox to its factory default state while saving your essential information.
Note: This will cause you to lose any Extensions and some Preferences.

• Open websites will not be saved in Firefox versions lower than 25.

To Reset Firefox do the following:

For Firefox versions previous to 29.0:

1. Go to Firefox > Help > Troubleshooting Information.
2. Click the "Reset Firefox" button.
3. Firefox will close and reset. After Firefox is done, it will show a window with the information that is imported. Click Finish.
4. Firefox will open with all factory defaults applied.

For Firefox 29.0 and above:

1. Click the menu button , click help and select Troubleshooting Information.Now, a new tab containing your troubleshooting information should open.
2. At the top right corner of the page, you should see a button that says "Reset Firefox". Click on it.
3. Firefox will close and reset. After Firefox is done, it will show a window with the information that is imported. Click Finish.
4. Firefox will open with all factory defaults applied.

Further information can be found in the Refresh Firefox - reset add-ons and settings article.

Did this fix your problems? Please report back to us! OR, in memory usage of firefox select firefox and in affinity oftion on right click dropdown menu select all cpu.

Hi gslrider, Thanks for posting. Sorry you are having problems with Firefox. If there is such a disparity between Firefox and Chrome, then assuming you are doing much the same sort of browsing on the same sites then something is very wrong.

CPU 96.0% vs 0.6% & RAM 1.46GB vs 0.1GB thats incredible ! No surprise you struggle to use Firefox.

TLD:DR No point in waiting for a magic fix from Mozilla Firefox it will not happen. If you wish we will help you investigate this. There will be a fix or work around available.

Post back to say whether you would like us to help and please include the full troubleshooting information, BUT keep that in its own reply and edit out the print related info to save space.

I said there must be a fix available. I do believe that, whether it is

• A Firefox regression fault affecting a small minority;
• Or something else: some particular website, a hardware issue, an OS or other software or malware issue.

Possibly you have already seen these articles as you obviously have tried at least some troubleshooting

• Firefox uses too much memory or CPU resources - How to fix
• Firefox uses too much memory or CPU resources - How to fix

Background waffle

If everyone or even a large minority see this issue it would have been fixed long ago. If a majority have that sort of issue it would stand out prominently in various reports & tests. I am sure Mozilla's User Advocacy team would deny that it is a well known issue and has been going on since Firefox 4.

My personal opinion, mainly based on unscientific observation of the forum is

• Fx4 specifically was bad and had a memory issue that went unreported. (The reason the telemetry feature was introduced)
• Some recent releases from maybe Fx26 have had various issues that may not yet be fully resolved.

I also stumble across problems myself with recent Firefox memory but not an issue bad or frequent enough to reproduce and lend itself to easy investigation.

At present I am using Firefox only on a single laptop without a battery and no way am I going to be able to leave that running 24/7 for two or three days to investigate a possible slow memory leak.

Presumably Firefox must sometimes behave itself for you.

At the moment just as a thought experiment, no need to try it right now. If you ran a clean install of Firefox in safe mode in a new test profile, and had no plugins active and less than 30 tabs open it would no doubt work.

It may not do some of the things you need but it would work yes ? And also be

• Reliable - not crashing or hanging
• Fast - probably as fast or faster than Chrome (Mozilla bragging)
• Not hogging Memory or CPU

In such circumstances I have no idea what your actual figures would be but lets say it is 20 times worse than Chrome on the CPU and twice as bad on RAM that would be 6%CPU and 0.3GB RAM that probably would not be putting any undue stress on your system.

If you can prove that works we can then troubleshoot to find the cause of the memory & CPU hogging.

If that does not work file a bug, you have demonstrated a problem and if it is with Firefox it needs fixing.

Full Firefox troubleshooting information may help give some clues, and you could not provide that because you posted from Chrome

We need some more non-personal information from you. Please do the following:

1. Use ONE of these methods to open the Firefox Troubleshooting Information page:
   • Click the menu button , click on help and select Troubleshooting Information.
   • Type about:support into the Firefox address bar and press the enter key.
2. At the top of the Troubleshooting Information page that comes up, you should see a button that says "Copy text to clipboard". Click it.
3. Now, go back to your forum post, right-click in the reply box and select Paste from the context menu (or else click inside the reply box and press the Ctrl+V keys) to paste all the information you copied into the forum post.

If you need further information about the Troubleshooting information page, please read the article Use the Troubleshooting Information page to help fix Firefox issues.

Thanks for the reply guys. Sadly, I've tried all of those. More than once. Unless I keep Firefox to a bare minimum, as in no unnecessary/essential browser plugins or extensions, it will keep doing this. But really, the reason why I prefer Firefox over other browsers, is that it is more customizable for each user experience. You take that ability away, I might as well stick with the other browsers that don't cause me any issues. The only thing I haven't done, is wiping my whole system and reinstalling everything from scratch, including the OS. And since Safari and Chrome work just fine, with barely any issues for me, I'll take that as I don't need to go that extreme. lol

The only way for me to resolve the issue each time, is to restart Firefox. My issue is having to restart Firefox every couple of days. I don't have to with Safari or Chrome. So these other browsers must be doing something right, that Firefox isn't. I'm not a isolated case. There are plenty of Firefox users that have complained about memory issues. But like me, we are all SOL. And that's the thing with companies, if in the grand scope of things, there are fewer people experiencing issues they can't resolve, they just let it be. Better for most to be content, and less work for them to do.

This was more of feedback than a question. But I appreciate your replies.

P.S. I've attached a screen shot of the usage for both Firefox and Chrome, opened for the same length of time. And used pretty much equally. Btw, I just restarted Firefox because it was lagging (only after one night), and it's already at the top of the list again.

Can you please do the following:

Update to 31 (we are going to run some troubleshooting here and need to be on the latest version to do so)

Open Firefox, and do two things:

1. type about:support into the address bar, press Enter. Press the "Copy text to clipboard" button and then paste that information here
2. when Firefox starts to use lots of memory, go to about:memory, and press "Minimize Memory Usage"