Why is my Firefox using insane amounts of ram?

There are a lot of combinations to Firefox using up so much RAM.

First, there's how Firefox stores background tabs (Firefox stores tabs in RAM,) so if you have a lot of tabs open, it will take up a lot of RAM. This is different than Opera, which I beleive stores them in a cache on your hard drive.

Then there's any extentions you may have. They, when running, will be factored into it's RAM use.

Then, there's any memory leaks that may be exposed in Firefox and any running extensions that can increase the RAM.

A good, quick fix is enabling trim_on_minimize and minimizing Firefox and then bringing it back up when it's RAM usage gets too high.

Originally Posted by Tsunade

Same problem... it's "heaver" than IE... but I still like it more

Actually, I have found IE to use just as much, if not more RAM than Firefox. One window, at about:blank was just taking up about 35MB of RAM, while Firefox, with 3 tabs (with content) open was using about 47MB.

Jam it back in, in the dark.