Η Mozilla plans to introduce a new feature in Firefox 67 Stable, which aims to improve the browser's memory usage in low memory conditions.
Browsers use much more memory than they did a decade ago. This is partly because websites have grown significantly in size but also because they have changed mode browsers.
It is no longer uncommon that individual tabs can use hundreds of Megabytes of memory and there are cases where memory usage is catching 1 Gigabyte in some of them.
Memory usage, especially on low memory devices, is a priority for browser manufacturers. If you are running Firefox or another browser on a system with 4 or 2 Gigabytes of RAM, you may experience problems due to large cache if you open several or the right kind of websites.
The concept of downloading tabs in a browser to free up memory is not new. Extensions for Firefox, such as Dormancy, Suspend Background Tabs, BarTab, or Unload Tab (no longer all compatible with Firefox 57 or newer), or respectively for Google Chrome Lazy Load Tabs, TabMemFree, or Tabs Limiter, have been around for years .
Although Mozilla has significantly improved the unloading of tabs in recent years, Firefox 67 plans to introduces a new feature to unload unused tabs to improve memory and reduce the number of crash conditions. The original error report for excessive memory usage is dated for eight years, but work on the new feature began seriously just before.
Mozilla uses a simple priority list to determine which tabs to unload when conditions trigger the application of the new attribute (from lowest to highest)
1. Normal tabs
2. Pinned tabs
3. Regular tabs that reproduce sound
4. Pinned tabs that reproduce sound
This feature is already available in Firefox Nightly. The Firefox 67 will be released on 14 May 2019 on the Fixed Browser channel, according to the release program.
Google has implemented a similar feature in the company's Chrome browser. 2015 was introduced, like Automatic Tab Discarding in Chrome settings, and discards the tabs from the memory if the system memory reaches a certain limit.
