Firefox versus Brave Browser

[SteamyTea]

This is just a quick, one sample, snapshot of a problem with Firefox Browser.

This has come about from a conversation with @Ed Davies on Zoots topic about a slow computer.

I have the latest version of FF and it is still memory hungry.

The screenshot is of Task Manger showing memory usage.

Brave has been open for an hour or so and has the forum loaded.

FF is just opened up with nothing loaded.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

I've just checked and Firefox seems to be using about 1Gb of memory on a Core i7-8550U machine that has 16Gb of DDR4-2400.  Seems to still be a bit of a memory hog to me. 

 

I've not tried Brave, but Pale Moon definitely seems lighter on resources than Firefox, and doesn't need fiddling with CSS tweaks to get things arranged sensibly (i.e. tabs below the bookmarks and menu bar).  Despite having used Firefox for years, it is gradually beginning to annoy me more and more with each "upgrade".  So far the CSS tweaks have been broken by updates twice, so now I have updates turned off by default and wait to see what stuff's been broken by them before I decide whether or not to implement them.

[Ed Davies]

Brave is advertising ware, isn't it?

 

Firefox 67.0.2 under Ubuntu MATE with a couple of forum tabs, a DuckDuckGo tab and a Wago tab open seems to be using 1.2GB. Total system usage is 1.6GB.

 

Which version of Firefox are you on?

[Jeremy Harris]

I'm not sure about Brave, I've not tried it.  I'm running Firefox 67.0.1 at the moment, and have Pale Moon 28.5.2 installed just to play around with.

[SteamyTea]

@Ed Davies using FF 67.0.2 the lastest update as of this afternoon.

Brave is based on Chromium and has an opt-in for their advertising system.  I have not opted in.

The main problem with Brave is that it is not a true portable app.  Passwords are stored on PC.

One thing I like about it is that it has TOR built in (just  click on the user icon and pick from list).

[ragg987]

I use firefox in preference to other browsers. I like the add-ins capability and it is stable. I don't think firefox is much worse than a comparable modern and feature-rich browser - example 9 tabs on FF uses 770Mb and Chrome 800Mb (Windows 10). On a modern computer you have at least 4Gb, likely higher - as far as I am concerned the more stuff in memory then the faster the computer is likely to be as it avoids reads from the drive.

 

I also notice that firefox will automatically use the memory if more is available. So if the computer is constrained it uses less memory. This may well be a feature of Windows 10 rather than firefox. In above example, when I opened more apps on the laptop FF memory use dropped to 500Mb, despite it being the foreground app.

 

I think this would only be a concern if you have an old computer using 1Gb or less of memory and with a slow hard drive. In that case probably best to avoid a feature-rich and memory hungry OS and browser.

[Jack9494]

Ungoogled chromium or Waterfox if you want speed & privacy.