How Can I Improve Firefox Performance With Many Open Tabs?

Communities
1

Hi everyone,

I’m a longtime Firefox user and tend to keep a lot of tabs open during my workday—sometimes 50 or more. Lately, I’ve noticed that Firefox slows down significantly when I have many tabs open, especially when switching between them or opening new ones.

I’ve tried a few things already:

  • Disabled unnecessary extensions
  • Turned on hardware acceleration
  • Limited background processes in about:config

These helped a bit, but the performance still isn’t where I’d like it to be. Before I start reorganizing my entire workflow, I wanted to ask the community:

What are your best tips or tools for optimizing Firefox performance with many open tabs?

Specifically, I’m curious about:

  • Any recommended add-ons for tab management
  • Settings tweaks in about:config
  • Strategies for suspending or unloading inactive tabs
  • RAM-saving tricks that actually work
  • Whether containers or multiple profiles help

Also, does using Firefox’s built-in “Tab Groups” (via extensions like Simple Tab Groups) make a difference?

Any advice from fellow heavy tab users would be greatly appreciated. I’d love to keep using Firefox efficiently without sacrificing my tab-heavy habits!

Thanks in advance!

1 Like
2

First, you should find out where the bottleneck is.
For example, next time it feels like Firefox is slow, open Task Manager (if you are on Windows), and switch to Performance tab:

image
image340×362 8.81 KB

Is the CPU maxed out? (something is wrong!)
Is Memory almost full? (most common issue, you likely need more RAM!)
Is Disk usage 100%? (something is wrong or RAM is full)

I would guess, your RAM is at 90%, at which point it swaps content to disk, making everything super slow. These days it’s best to have at least 16GB RAM, but for heavy tab user I would go even further to 32GB.

The good news is, RAM is quite cheap these days and many Notebooks and most Desktops can be easily upgraded.

PS: did you know that a single Gmail tab can consume ~1GB of RAM? :open_mouth: