> I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites.
Of course this is not the experience of the vast majority of Firefox users, so it's pointless to suggest that this means something about Firefox's overall quality. You can easily find people making the same sorts of complaints about Chrome.
Firefox gigantic leaks happen to me on Windows too. Depending on the mood, it ends with a crash or with Windows warning me that it will kill some processes if that keeps going on.
Some mornings I'm beachballing for my whole first coffee. Eventually I just wind up power cycling the mac if I can't open a shell prompt with which to `pkill -9 plugin-container`....
I'm on Mac too and I've never seen anything like this. The odd tab will crash (particularly after I started using containers extensively and more than one adblocker/anti-tracker), but that's it.
> pkill -9 plugin-container
Ahhh, ok - that's not FF, that's a crap plugin (likely Flash). It's the browser equivalent of blaming Windows when a crap taiwanese driver gets it stuck. You could try uninstalling all that crap.
It could be a genuine leak, but it sounds an awful lot like Firefox using 28 GiB of virtual memory.
Firefox often appears to use large amounts of memory in top / htop, but I believe that's just reported address space allocations. The RES column gives a more accurate depiction of memory usage.
It was real memory. I know the difference. I only noticed because I got an OOM error in my Java program and X11 froze, couldn't use my mouse. This happened multiple times with different heavy duty JS websites, particularly SPAs.
Of course this is not the experience of the vast majority of Firefox users, so it's pointless to suggest that this means something about Firefox's overall quality. You can easily find people making the same sorts of complaints about Chrome.