The "Browser Ate My Memory!" thread

[igor_kavinski]

I'm on Windows 8.1 (Core i7-3720QM Thinkpad 32GB RAM) and this hardware runs the OS pretty well. It's basically my internet browsing machine.

One great reason for staying on Win8.1 is no pesky updates forcing a restart.



HOWEVER, since Firefox is my preferred browser, it leaks RAM regularly and I have to keep killing tabs whenever total RAM consumption gets over 90%. For instance,



Yeah. That's just one tab eating up 4GB! And after I took the screenshot, it briefly went up to 5GB and then to 2GB and then started increasing again. So killed it I did.

I also use Chrome, Brave and Opera (old version) for various other stuff but usually Firefox is where I spend the most time.

So question, any ideas about a suitable Firefox replacement that works fine on Win8.1 without hoarding RAM unnecessarily?

 

[Brian_B]

Wow you mean you don't use Microsoft Edge? Every other week my Windows 11 machine moves it back to default for me as a reminder that it really is the premier web browsing experience. There was even a popup for it on my iPhone the other day, of all places.

/s

 

[igor_kavinski]

I tried using it on my Haswell work PC. It would freeze occasionally which was annoying so stopped using it for more than 5 or 6 tabs. I have it available on Win8.1 too but I steer clear of it.

 

[Marees]

I've always used Opera (from the times of owning a Nokia phone)

 

[igor_kavinski]

I have some old Opera version that I installed probably back in 2018. Don't want to update since the newest version is supposed to be Chinese owned. The version I have is pretty good though. Still pretty responsive and for some reason, Youtube runs really well on it. But it also has the memory leak issue even though I only use it mainly for gmail and overclock.net. Thankfully, it has a great feature where it brings back the tabs. For both Firefox and Chrome, I have to kill the parent process rudely to get the option to restore tabs as they were.