Multiple Tabs in Firefox

[BobH]

It is my custom to have tabs open in Firefox for about 10 of my most frequently used URLs. This allows me to transition quickly with a single click to a different web page.

Does this cause any appreciable use of resources? By inference, I deduce that each tab's URL, it's display contents, and probably a few more bytes of info, are stored in cached RAM which might, on occasion, be written to disk. Of course, this takes up some RAM; but I don't have a clue how much RAM is required to store a web page's contents.

Can anyone shed light on this? Is it a practice I should abandon? Am I paying a price for this convenience that I don't see?

If I had more RAM or could add more to the laptop, I wouldn't be concerned at all; but I wonder if some of my slow downs in running other apps might be caused by not having RAM available because I've bound it up in Firefox.

[HansV]

You can keep track of how much CPU power and memory Firefox uses in Task Manager. When I took the screenshot below, I had 7 tabs open in Firefox.

S2591.png

Is the 1.7 GB much? It depends on how much RAM you have. My PC has 16 GB, so it's not a huge percentage.

[StuartR]

It very much depends on what web sites you have open. Facebook, and Google docs use far more resources than basic text based sites.

[BobH]

Thank you, Gentlemen.

It had not occurred to me to use Task Manager to check. When I did, I found that Firefox is consuming 3GB of the 8GB I have; so maybe it's time to cut back on the number of open tabs.

Again, thank you.

[PJ_in_FL]

Thank you, Gentlemen.

It had not occurred to me to use Task Manager to check. When I did, I found that Firefox is consuming 3GB of the 8GB I have; so maybe it's time to cut back on the number of open tabs.

Again, thank you.

8 GB is at the very low end of a usable configuration with newer Windows versions and Firefox as a browser, which is a known memory hog.

Can you add more memory? That will get more bang for the buck of almost any upgrade.

[BobH]

Thanks, PJ.

No, I can't add memory. The laptop is a low end Dell Inspiron.

When building computers in the past, I always put 32GB in them. Most mobos accommodated that easily. At the time, there were no apps that could address anything above the 32GB limit. IDK if that has changed.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've always said that the first upgrade to any computer should be to increase RAM because it gives the biggest bang for the buck.