The "Browser Ate My Memory!" thread

I

igor_kavinski

Semi-regular
Joined
Aug 15, 2025
Messages
945
Reaction score
549
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.

1771216962473.png

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,

1771217089470.png

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?
 
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
 
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.
 
I've always used Opera (from the times of owning a Nokia phone)
 
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.
 
1777801033348.png

Not even a tab. A frickin' subframe. It disappeared after I took the screenshot, like it freaked out that it got busted.
 
Seems it's a YouTube problem where it's eating 7gb of ram in browsers.
 
Why are you still running Windows 8.1 on this computer? Surely Windows 10 or a Linux could be better? It's not like Windows 10 has a lot of updates these days, and even Windows 11 could be configured for updates reduced or turned off.
 
I don't believe for a second that Win10 or Win11 will run better on this laptop. It's just too old. Anyway, the internal fan seems to have jammed up or failed completely so I'm running it over a laptop cooler now. The SSD has less than 17% writes remaining. I'm still trying to decide whether to clone this installation over to a new SSD or just move over to a Comet Lake Thinkpad that I have lying around. The problem with that is that the Comet Lake runs much hotter which is why I haven't migrated to it yet.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Become a Patron!
Back
Top