How to prevent the Firefox web browser from consuming too many system resources
Jack Wallen shows how to stop Firefox from consuming all your system resources and make the browser faster.
Every once in a while I give up Firefox only to come back to it later because I find other browsers either unreliable, insecure, or just too feature-packed. I want a web browser to be a web browser, not a kitchen sink full of features I neither need nor want.
One of the reasons that turns me away from Firefox is how heavily it can drain system resources. When there’s a problem, I can launch Firefox and hear the fans on my System76 Thelio come to life, as if to say, “Captain, I’ll give her everything she’s got!” Well, Scotty, sometimes just enough is enough doesn’t, and Firefox crashes the system.
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No longer. Although the solution for this is hidden from users, it is actually quite easy to solve. So what’s happening right now?
At first I assumed it was my pinned tabs because I had quite a few of them, so I unpinned them – only to see the same problem. Next I thought it was probably an extension so I disabled them all – only to see the same issue. This shouldn’t happen on a computer with 32GB of RAM and a fairly hefty processor (i9-9900K CPU @ 3.60GHz), and yet it does.
But as said, the solution comes in the form of hardware acceleration, a process by which applications offload certain tasks to system hardware instead of just using the CPU. Firefox is one such application that can benefit significantly from HWA, but is disabled by default. Let’s activate it.
What you need to speed up Firefox
The only things you need for this are an updated instance of Firefox and a computer that supports HWA. On Linux, finding HWA support is as simple as running the glxinfo | grep render” and look for the line “direct rendering: Yes”. How to find out if your system supports HWA depends on the operating system you are using.
Let’s give Firefox a much-needed speed boost with these things available.
How to enable HWA in Firefox
Open Firefox and type about:config in the address bar. You will then be prompted to accept the risk before proceeding. Click accept risk and continue and you are in Firefox Advanced Configuration Editor (Figure A).
Figure A
Type “layers.acceleration.force-enabled” in the search box and press Enter on your keyboard. You should then see it listed in the results (Figure B).
Figure B
Click the right and left arrow icons associated with the entry until false changes to true. Once this is done, close and restart Firefox.
If layers.acceleration.force-enabled is not listed, you must create it by right-clicking an empty area and choosing New | Boolean. Name the new entry layers.acceleration.force-enabled and set it to true. Restart Firefox and you’re done.
At this point, you should find that Firefox has stopped spinning your system fans and isn’t consuming so much system resources that it all grinds to a halt. Hopefully this fixes whatever is troubling you with Firefox.
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