Are we all going to ignore this person had Firefox open for weeks?
Yes.
Stop trying to shame people for using their damn computer.
Stop downvoting people who treat computers the way they ought to work! Needing to restart shit, with any regularity, is a flaw. Some of us are doing work, god dammit, and having to get things set up from scratch is a pain in the ass.
All the stuff I have open is open for a reason. The fact it all gradually stops working is not excused by the fact it can be unfucked by a hard reset. It's supposed to keep working.
Seems like a waste of electricity to me
I'm pretty sure sleep more uses more energy than turning the machine off when it's not in use
Slightly yes. Its also much more convenient.
Why is that unusual? The only time I close apps is when I restart for an update like once or twice a month.
And your computer is running THE WHOLE TIME?
No of course not, sleep + hibernate after awhile in sleep mode is the default on windows.
Under about:unloads, you will see a list of open tabs, sorted by resource usage. You can click-spam the "Unload" button until that list is empty, or until the most resource-intensive tabs are off the list.
This does not require any third-party dependencies, and the tab will still be present on top. The site will reload once the tab is selected again.
What you're describing is called a resource leak. Something, an extension, a background process, etc., is holding onto resources for too long without cleaning itself up automatically.
This is pretty common in writing code, and extremely difficult to prevent except in closed and well understood systems. A browser is anything but that, due to the nature of needing to work on any website doing whatever they want.
Adeptus mechanicus would be proud of this dude.
It's either you need more RAM or you must learn to use a tab group extension. Also, if it gets slow, just restart it.
Simple Tab Groups is a nice add-on.
My personal favourite is Sidebery. It has vertical tabs and easily navigatable via mouse wheel. You can even unload a tab. And has tons of customization options.
Most software in general has hard to detect issues after several weeks of uptime. Its something that's fundamentally hard to test and fix. Its a big reason why "did you turn it off and on again" is such universal advice.
People really out here treating their web browser like it's a mainframe
Even if the software was perfect, virtually all desktop RAM isn't ECC equipped, so you potentially have even the hardware corrupting the state and requiring restarting because of that.
I don't hold anything against you, OP, but... 30 tabs open for two weeks makes me feel yucky on the inside.
I have multiple Firefox windows with around 1-1.5k tabs on each, and they have been opened (and re opened) since about a year.
I ❤️ tabs, they make me feel all warm on the inside
Yeah, I get twitchy when I have more than about ten tabs open. My senior regularly has thousands, across multiple browser windows. There are two types of people.
Why would you need your browser, let alone your PC on for weeks without any break
Yes it happens. As others have said: just restart.
What might not be as clear: when you restart, if it doesn't just come up and offer to restore your session, you can go to History and Restore Previous Session. This reopens all your tabs (actually, they won't fully reload until you view them).
I've had this for years, I just exit and restart.
You can see the worst offenders in firefox by using the hamburger menu then more tools and Task manager. You can sort by ram. YouTube likes to hold gigs of ram for some videos. Close the biggest offenders and you'll get back close to normal speed.
In my experience this doesn't matter. Firefox just slows down if it's been open for long, regardless for how long the tab has been open for. Even if you unload all active tabs and open a new one, that new tab will still be significantly slower than it would be if you restarted the entire browser.
It's some kind of slow resource leak somewhere.
If it's related to the thread you posted then try Nightly?
That's only in Nightly right now, unfortunately; it won't make it out to Release until v134.
Also, can I ask why you'd leave your browser open for weeks? Just curious of the use case. The thread mentions having 5700-7000 open tabs, and I can't fathom why someone would do that. It's not like the websites disappear if you close the tab. Nothing to do with the problem though, you don't have to answer.
Close everything and start fresh
Your productivity shouldn't rely on keeping one piece of software running for long periods of time.
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